TITLE: The End of the Man from M.I.M.E.?
NAME: Greg M. Johnson
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: pterandon@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/pterandon/anims.html
TOPIC: The End of...
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: endomime.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5


TOOLS USED: 

        Modeller: Povray 3.5, "a raytracer, not a modeller."
        Sound editing & timing: Audacity
        MPEG composing & optimization: TMPENc
        Creation of chairs: Hamapatch


CREATION TIME: 
    the whole contest period. Render time was about 7 h,
enabling me to make 40+ drafts over the contest period.  (I had a plot in mind
before the contest period but of course the end product turned out to be
completely different). 


HARDWARE USED: 
    Aptiva 2.8 GHz


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    A surrealistic cross between a spy/ superhero flick and
any evaluation process.  The villains want to bring about "The End of ..." the
good guy; the evaluators want to get to "The End of ..." a bad movie / an
aggravating review of a poor performer.  Any parody involved is
tongue-in-cheek, not out of any sense of bitterness.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    Suspension of disbelief. (Probably not good enough to
view fullscreen).


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

THANKS TO:   
Ryan S. Johnson (my nephew) for making the original soundtrack and giving
permission to use;
My wife for feedback on some of the grossest errors in early versions;
My son for general exuberance;
The crew at news.povray.org for advice on overcoming multiple technical
difficulties over the years.


There are six characters in the animation.  The green (1) and steel-blue (2)
ones allowed me to indulge in a bit of nostalgia, as they were created years
ago when the level of sophistication (IMNSHO) in my POV-Ray blob characters was
no where it is today.  The Man from M.I.M.E. (3) character and the human
villain in olive green  (4) (tenatively named Dr. Palein), also POV-Ray blobs,
were used in my last entry, albeit with improvements for nonlinear movement. 
The red robots (5) are procedurally generated from a list of points for the
joints in a human body, and use the same walk cycle file that I've used for the
human in the last round.  And of course there's a gold CSG robot (6). 

I believe that I was able to achieve a higher level of polish in this anim
compared to other entries because of smarter use of lighting and simpler
setting (backdrop) which both allowed for a quick render.

KNOWN PROBLEMS: 
1) The arm swing of the hero during his punch of the robot has at least two
problems 
i) It pauses mid stroke.  This is a necessary flaw in my "non-linear" movement
algorithm: it's a royal pain to turn off.  Fixing it would have involved
another manmonth of coding.
ii) The elbow flits around either goofily or unrealstically.  I have to animate
the elbow orientation vector as a separate variable, and with the torso twisted
around several tens of degrees about the y axis, this too became a math
headache.  I'm sure the last-minute attempt to address this problem will have
created a few new ones. ;-p

2) Unpleasant pixelation of screen raster.  I think I could have fixed it with
another render or two

3) One of the character's hands intersects the table while voting.

4) Probably too many compression artifacts from MPEG encoding.  I spent weeks
optimizing a version that turned out to be 11,298,820 bytes and had to scrunch
it a bit at the last minute. 

