TITLE: The Impostor
NAME: Sascha Ledinsky
COUNTRY: Austria
EMAIL: sascha@jpatch.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.jpatch.com
TOPIC: Imposter!
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: impostor.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV 1.1


TOOLS USED: 

        JPatch (development version)
        JLipSync
        Audacity
        Zerius Vocoder
        TMPGEnc
        Wine to run Win32 applications on Linux


CREATION TIME: 

        About a month


HARDWARE USED: 

        Pentium IV, 2.8 GHz, 1GB, Linux


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

        Someone's trying to obtain an I.R.T.C. award by fraud - he claims to be
the famous Rusty robot (see John VanSickle's I.R.T.C. animations) and gets
quite upset when unmasked. Fortunately the clerk at the I.R.T.C. museum is
alert. But see yourself...
                                        
        I should note that Greg M. Johnson mentioned using Rusty for the
impersonator topic on the newsgroups. Ordinarily, duplicating someone else's
idea would be a bad thing, but given the topic, I think multiple submissions of
the same basic idea would actually be quite appropriate.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

        It has got a soundtrack, including a spoken dialog,
        but I've also included subtitles to not violate any I.R.T.C. rules ;-)
        


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

        All objects have been modeled and animated by me using JPatch
(www.jpatch.com). I've used MegaPOV to render it because some textures (the
clerks hair and skin) use its AOI pattern to fake rim lights.                
        The image on the wall is "Always running, never the same...", courtesy
of Jaime Vives Piqueres (thanks Jaime!). I chose it because I wanted an IRTC
winner image on display in the entrance hall of the museum - this one looked
best when scaled down to that low resolution, and it is POV-Ray for Windows'
splash-screen, so many people may recognize it.
        
        JPatch has still no support for bones, so I've animated everything using
morphs.
        
        The clerk's voice has been recorded by David Cuny (thanks a lot!). For
the robot voice I've used an online demo of AT&T's Natural Voices and the
Zerius vocoder. The other sound samples were taken from various sources on the
internet, and postprocessed using Audacity. The background music has also been
created by David Cuny using Band In A Box.

        Finally I'd like to thank everyone on the JPatch forum for their
valuable feedback and support, and of course the makers of POV-Ray and
MegaPov!

