Type: gfx/anim

Uploader: BIRJT@cc.newcastle.edu.au

Author: Kiernan Holland


Kiernan Holland (C) 1993 
June 1, 1993

Flying (fly by) animation. 

I put all these frames in a format which can be assembled using 
REND24. I do not provide an assembled animation because 
it would require a lot more storage (I estimate about 
4 - 12 megs depending on much color you want. The Animation is 120 
frames long, using Rend24 you can render it in grey scale, 
IFF24 animations, HAM8, whatever you like. This is why it is 
in unassembled form. The other reason (besides this) is I didn't 
want to drag this stuff home and assemble it then drag it back to 
school. 

I made the entire animation using C code that I wrote, Rayshade 
4.0, Glenn's TDDD library and Imagine 1.1. I make my objects in Imagine, 
convert them with TDDD2RAY then I have a C program run Rayshade 
for every frame in the animation and compress each frame to 
JPEG format from RLE format. Sounds like a lot of stuff to do, 
but really once the code is written to automate the process, 
all I have to do is spend about 5 minutes configuring everything 
and I let the computers at school crunch the numbers... leaving 
my Amiga free (of course) to do anything I want. You see, I'm 
not one of those Amiga users which spends most of his time tieing up 
his computer with tasks that it needn't do. Amiga's are best for creativity 
not for grunge work, a network full of unused workstations over a 
summer break is what you should do your ray-tracings on ;-) .

If you need any code to start making your own fly-bys, I have some 
relatively simple C programs that you can rearrange to match your 
system and automate the task. 

Kiernan Holland
kholland@chicoma.lanl.gov

PS- This animation took about 6 megs of memory to render (all the time)
and contains more than 13,000 primitives (One object which wasn't 
included had about 20-40K primitives, thats why ;-) ). 
Total ray-tracing time was less than a day on one VAX 5000 (Decstation) 
equiped with Rayshade 4.0 and UNIX. A preview took me about 
3 hours to render and that was 100 frames at 320x200-24bit
on the same workstation.

 PERMSSN    UID  GID    PACKED    SIZE  RATIO     CRC       STAMP          NAME
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
[generic]                 1183    2191  54.0% -lh5- c70e Jun 13  1994 flying.readme
[generic]               594041  594041 100.0% -lh0- 0ed6 Jun 13  1994 flying1.lha
[generic]               590841  590841 100.0% -lh0- 7738 Jun 13  1994 flying2.lha
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
 Total         3 files 1186065 1187073  99.9%            Jun 13  1994