EMAIL: <hcb@chaoticmind.net>
NAME: Helge Bahmann
TOPIC: Dance
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Danse Macabre
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.6 (Debian Etch)
TOOLS USED: Python, Gimp, Text editor, Rosegarden, timidyt, mjpeg tools, lame, brain
CREATION TIME: 14 days modelling; 20 hours rendering
HARDWARE USED: Dual Opteron 240
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: vlc (VideoLan Client) works fine
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

During the night two skeletons awake on the graveyard and dance their last tango.
Contains an audio track.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

The first thing that immediately came into my mind for the topic "Dance"
is Tango Argentino; the second thing that came into my mind is
Camille-Saint-Sans' dance of the fossils. With these ideas in mind I first
used Rosegarden to create the music -- yes I know the competition is about
raytracing, but it was by far the easist part -- by combining "Fossils" with the
traditional tango "El Choclo".

After that I choreographed a small sequence of (very basic) Tango Argentino steps.
This was by far the most fun part of the project as I had to dance through
my appartment, putting paper marks on the ground to note where I stepped.

Then I created all models (skeletons, graveyard etc.) in Povray with CSG; the
only notable exception is the skull head, for which I used jpatch (www.patch.com)
and exported it as a povray mesh. The models were then made "posable" by
sprinkling statements such as "transform {L_WRIST}" through the model at
strategic places.

I then improvised a "small set" (~1500 lines) of python scripts to pose the models;
since the scripts have grown with their task they are now quite capable, I intend
to release them separately. I have put up a screenshot of what the pose assistor
looks like at http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb/irtc/pose_assist.png

For the tango I posed small "step sequences" of 10-20 frames each; these
"basic" steps were then combined into the dance sequence as seen in the film
with yet another python script. The other animation sequences were created
"in one piece".

Intro and outtro where created using gimp and python+imlib. Finally, everything
was encoded and assembled using mjpegtools. Syncing video and audio caused
some head scratching but worked out well in the end.

Overall I am pleased with the animation, though I had something more ambituous in
mind at the beginning. I regretfully do not include sources this time because
they are a) a mess, and b) in their present form way too big (every pose is represented
as a single povray include file - sources are around 8MB). However if you are
interested in certain parts of them, just drop me a mail.

Attributions: For the soundtrack I used clips licensed under the "CC sampling plus"
license from the freesound project (refer to http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/ for
details).
