TITLE: The Maze
NAME: Martin Dickopp
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: firefly-mail@gmx.net
TOPIC: Escape
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: maze.mpg
ZIPFILE: maze.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Emacs, Perl, FFmpeg, Gimp (for the Movie Poster)

HARDWARE USED: 
    166 MHz Pentium I and 500 MHz Petium III, both running GNU/Linux
RENDER TIME: 8 hr 47 min 54 sec

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 


A person tries to escape from a maze in a swampy land. He manages to get
out, but what is that thing that appears as a thin line at the horizon?
As the camera zooms back, the viewer sees...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


First of all, I have written a Perl script to create a random maze
(makemaze.pl in the ZIP file). It prints a text representation of the maze,
and writes a POV-Ray representation of the same (consisting of a number of
"box" statements) to a file. With this script, I have created a 6x6 maze
(smallmaze.inc and smallmaze.txt in the ZIP file) and a 111x111 maze
(largemaze.inc in the ZIP file).

Other than that, everything is in a single, hand-written POV-Ray file.
Simply letting the "clock" varible run from 0 to 1 generates the whole
animation -- no post-processing of any kind has been done.

The movement path through the maze follows a cubic spline. To make it easier
to visualize and verify the path, I have introduced a flag in the POV-Ray
file which causes the maze to be rendered in top view, with the path shown
as a colored line. (In this mode, the "clock" variable is ignored.) The file
path.jpg in the ZIP file contains the result.

The grass which can occasionally be seen consists of "mesh2" objects. Their
size and position is randomized to some extent.

