dbott schrieb:
> When do we start viewing.....? First time submitting.
> I don't expect to place, I am just curious.
> Also, I never received a confirmation email,
> but my animation is there. Is that normal......?

"Sort of".

If my memory servers right, back in the old days { ca. 2003 ;) }, the 
server ran on automatic, checking the entries and sending out 
confirmation mails as the movies came in. Even then, there was a certain 
delay, often days, until the web pages were updated. The FTP and 
download files were usually available rather soon.
Since there's this sort-of transitional phase now going on (with new 
programming, new admins, admins being busy, etc.), the check-and-confirm 
is launched by hand -> admin no time = no confirmation.
Don't ask for the web pages :)

I guess it's going to take a few days (fingers crossed...) until things 
start moving...

Yo, admins: new topic? Pretty please?

-Markus

Post a reply to this message

> Yuck. Ewww. I did that hideous stuff, and it's OUT IN PUBLIC? Uh oh... ;)

Bet mines more yucky than yours.

So what was on your reading list? I think I'm sorley in need of some
education (especially regards to 3D maths).

Why is it that the IRTC animation comp always seems so under-entered but the
stills typically has loads of entries?

Post a reply to this message

A great book is Beginning Math and Physics for Game
Programmers...by Wendy Stahler. You don't have to a
Astrophysicist to understand it. I'm a newbe, but I will
start competing regularly. This is my third animation I've completed and I
seem to getting better with each one.
But I guess you'll be the judge of  that. ()^()...........
--NEED A NEW TOPIC--
dbott


"i_need_a_unique_name" <ine### [at] gmailcom> wrote in message
news:web.45b0e6a648a177e0c3e0e7940@news.povray.org...
> > Yuck. Ewww. I did that hideous stuff, and it's OUT IN PUBLIC? Uh oh...
;)
>
> Bet mines more yucky than yours.
>
> So what was on your reading list? I think I'm sorley in need of some
> education (especially regards to 3D maths).
>
> Why is it that the IRTC animation comp always seems so under-entered but
the
> stills typically has loads of entries?
>
>
>

Post a reply to this message

> Why is it that the IRTC animation comp always seems so under-entered but the
> stills typically has loads of entries?

I can think of a lot of reasons that have very little to do with the
competition itself:

* Animation is hard. Good animation is harder.
* POV doesn't have a GUI for animation.
* POV doesn't render MPEG files automatically.
* More models have to be made, for multiple scenes.
* Models have to be articulated for animation, or they break in nasty ways.
* Animation needs a story with a beginning, middle and end.
* Render times are much higher, because you need 24 frames for one second.

Additionally:

* There aren't many free animation programs.
* Animation programs have a large learning curve.
* It's hard to compete against professional animation packages.

Now, John VanSickle scored all the animation rounds last year using "pure"
POV-Ray, even against Markus Altendorff's excellent animations, which used
Maxxon 3D. So take three with a grain of salt.

On the other hand, there were a number of submissions I was surprised to
find didn't even make Honorable Mention:

   - Leroy Whetstone/October-January 2006
   - M.A.c.v./October-January 2006
   - Nimish Ajmani/July-October 2006

So why didn't these get Honorable Mentions? It's because the scoring doesn't
actually follow the above guidelines. The Animation Rules page says the
competition is "run by and for amateurs with cheap tools":

> The competition is not about winning. You do not have to be a professional,
> or even any good! Experts are welcome, but the contest is run by and for
> amateurs with cheap tools. Those lucky enough to have more impressive skills
> and equipment are asked to share their wisdom, but we are more impressed by
> someone who can be creative with what they have, than someone who has
> everything.

Finding the actual guidelines is a bit difficult:

   - They aren't on the Animation Rules page
   - They aren't on the Animation Voting Rules page
   - They aren't on the Animation FAQ page

Instead, it's buried in the Stills FAQ page, and specifically references
IMAGES, not animation (emphasis added):

> [5.1] How are the winners selected?
>    By a vote among the other entrants and IRTC Panel Judges. Once the ratings
> are in for all the IMAGES, each IMAGE has an "overall" rating calculated, as
> the mean of its artistic, technical, and concept ratings. The three IMAGES
> with the highest overall ratings are selected as the first, second, and third
> place winners.

> [5.2] What is Honorable Mention?
>    Sometimes one or more IMAGES have higher ratings in one or two categories
> than some or all of the winners. To honor such IMAGES we developed the
> "Honorable Mention" designation. We select the three IMAGES which had the
> highest rating in a single category, exclusive of winners and other Honorably
> Mentioned IMAGES. An IMAGE designated for Honorable Mention may or may not
> receive a prize, depending on availability and the discretion of the IRTC
> admins.

All the submissions I referenced are on low-submission rounds, and the pages
say "Due to low turnout this round, no Honorable Mentions were awarded."
I've read through the rules, and I'm not sure where the "low turnout" rule
is mentioned.

It's particularly ironic in that prize winning submissions actually benefit
from less submissions, but "amateur" submissions suffer.

Animations can also score in:

> Notable for: [ ]Texture [ ]Lighting [ ]Modelling [ ]Composition [ ]Originality

These are the same as the Still Images - no animation-specific scoring (such
as lipsync, etc.). If these are factored into scores, I don't see it
documented anywhere.

Anyway, my suspicion is that the scoring system actually ends up
discouraging "amateurs with cheap tools". A POV-Ray user might get extra
points in the "Technical" category, but how about a user of Art of
Illusion, Anim8or, or Blender? What if (like John VanSickle and his
LionSnake modeler) you've actually written your own modeler or animator?
Should you get extra points for that?

Making Honorable Mention a bit easier to get into might help (i.e. adding a
"cheap tool" or "newbie" bonus), but that's awfully subjective.

Anyway, these can be factors in discouraging someone who submitted from
submitting again. But I'm guessing the biggest barrier to people submitting
animations in the first place is still my first point: Animation is Hard.

Post a reply to this message

dbott wrote:
> A great book is Beginning Math and Physics for Game
> Programmers...by Wendy Stahler. You don't have to a
> Astrophysicist to understand it. I'm a newbe, but I will
> start competing regularly. This is my third animation I've completed and I
> seem to getting better with each one.
> But I guess you'll be the judge of  that. ()^()...........

We'd all like to, i guess (to the admins: hint, hint, nudge, 
nudge ;)

> --NEED A NEW TOPIC--
> dbott
> 
> 
> "i_need_a_unique_name" <ine### [at] gmailcom> wrote in message
> news:web.45b0e6a648a177e0c3e0e7940@news.povray.org...
>>> Yuck. Ewww. I did that hideous stuff, and it's OUT IN PUBLIC? Uh oh...
> ;)
>> Bet mines more yucky than yours.
>>
>> So what was on your reading list? I think I'm sorley in need of some
>> education (especially regards to 3D maths).

Uh, sorry, i'm more of the mouse-pushing type, and less 
competent when it comes to the actual math behind it... 
(though i once wrote a 3-D drawing routine on my ZX Spectrum 
48 kByte, and a spinning 3-D map for a never-to-be 
roleplaying game on my Amiga 2000 - am i a fossil or what? ;)

Well, a book that really inspired was Arndt von 
Koenigsmarck's "Femme Digitale" (Addison-Wesley), though 
i've not even started yet to build more of his sculpting 
hints into my models - except for the design guides to build 
eyes from separate layers instead of textured sphere 
primitives. It's geared towards the 
Maya/3Ds/Cinema/Blender/etc. users, though, not those that 
enjoy coding by TextPad ;)
At least i've learned that mixing triangles and quads in a 
mesh isn't the brightest thing to do, and that there's much 
to learn when shaping hands and feet :)

There's another one, sneakily also called "Femme Digitale", 
by Michael Burns. I'd NOT recommend that one, because it's 
trying to do too much in too little space. Nice pictures, 
nice screenshots, but - trying to explaind modelling AND 
texturing of a complete human figure on six pages doesn't 
really teach you anything. It covers everything and then 
some, from Photoshop to Poser to Max to Featured Artists, 
but it doesn't do anything really in depth. Where AvK takes 
a dozen pages for the do's and dont's of the fingers alone, 
with MB it's more like "hey, pick a Poser preset, run 
Photoshop across and be done with it." I was lucky as it was 
on sale when i ordered it at a well-known internet book 
retailer whose name vaguely reminds of a tropical river ;), 
because i wouldn't spend more than the 5 $ on it - if i want 
pictures to make me green with envy, i'd get a high-gloss 
Royo, Sorayama or Vallejo collection for 9,95 $ ;)

The other was Koenigsmark's "Cinema 4D v.9" workshop book 
(published by Addison-Wesley, too), which i got for an 
incredible 3 Euros at an electronics store (with v.10 out, 
they were clearing their stock), without which i wouldn't 
have started to save time by animating using "intelligent" 
objects (like e.g. mechanical devices that are operated by a 
single keyframed input which internally calculates/affects 
various angles/positions - i've built a robot arm that has 
an attached user data slider which not only opens/closes the 
"fingers" but also drives the angle of the corresponding 
worm gear in a convincing manner; a four-layer door with 
bolts that makes use of a similar logic, and warning beacons 
spinning and flashing all by themselves (and a timer) ;)

Also, this time, the arms of my humanoid models don't use 
inverse kinematics for positioning, but instead a set of 
multiple 2-axis remote-control input boxes cross-connected 
to multiple bones, including mapping input/output values to 
avoid unnatural poses:
- Shoulder X/Y translates the angle of the shoulder bone
- Upper Arm X/Y has "up/down +/- 100 degrees" on the Y axis, 
and "forward/back +/- 100 degrees" on the X axis
- Lower Arm X/Y has "Heading Straight 0 / folded on + 170" 
for the Lower Arm on the X, and "Rotate Upper Arm Bone +/- 
90 degrees" on the Y axis
- Hand X/Y has a wiring to the Tilt and Roll of the hand 
bone, instead of the heading/tilt.

When i animate, i animate the controllers instead of the 
actual bones, which looks a bit different compared to 
keyframing the bones' angles themselves, but the tweening is 
less artificial than IK can sometimes be.

There are a few "broken by design" points i still need to 
address, like the problem of the upper arm mesh rolling at 
the shoulder joint (it shouldn't, because the twist of 
tissue extends across the whole upper arm - need to create a 
chain of "helper bones" that maintain the shoulder at null 
twist and accumulate the twist down the upper arm). Another 
mess is that once the arm tilt approaches 90 degrees (arm 
down/up), the result of heading and roll axis collapse into 
one. A null bone for the heading/tilt, and an additional one 
for the roll would solve that.
And don't get me started about the hip bone, which i failed 
to de-couple from the standard orientation, so any swaying 
left/right runs through a 0/360 border - it's OK if you 
keyframe it, but once you decide to re-work the motion 
curves, it tends to do lower-back-breaking because the any 
little shifting of H/P/R angles wreaks havoc on the 
orientation...

>> Why is it that the IRTC animation comp always seems so under-entered but
> the
>> stills typically has loads of entries?

Well, unless you're doing an incredibly detailed still 
scene, animating may be even more time-consuming than 
building a still picture? (did i write that out loud? 
Ooops... anyone from the stills crowd here? Nobody? Whew... ;)

-Markus

Post a reply to this message

> Well, unless you're doing an incredibly detailed still
> scene, animating may be even more time-consuming than
> building a still picture? (did i write that out loud?
> Ooops... anyone from the stills crowd here? Nobody? Whew... ;)
>
> -Markus



Of course we know that making animations is more time assuming than stills.



Anyway, it seems like we have one problem in common. The IRTC server has

though the stills round deadline ended on the 31st of December, a new topic


either.

ever.
Just wanted to make you aware of this, and perhaps to drag you into the
discussion :-)

Hildur (one of those many stills submitters).

Post a reply to this message

Hildur K. wrote:


*Gasp* Incredible! Those ninja stills guys! Always around, 
but invisible right until they move :)

> Anyway, it seems like we have one problem in common. The IRTC server has

> though the stills round deadline ended on the 31st of December, a new topic


> either.

> ever.

Last animations round, it took three weeks plus (Oct. 15 - 
Nov. 10) for the next topic to appear.

I'm hoping for something to happen over the weekend... 
anyway, i wouldn't mind delays, if at least there'd be the 
occasional heads-up from the admins... the way it's right 
now, it feels like some kind of limbo.

Currently, i'm re-rendering my animation with the camera 10 
cm to the left and 1 degree turned right, and then i'll try 
to create a red-green anaglyph video version. I'd rather be 
dwelling on the new topic, though...
I've also had good success by cross-eyeing two playback 
windows side-by-side, it helps to hold the hand so that the 
left eye sees the right window and vice versa.

-Markus

Post a reply to this message

David Cuny wrote:
>>Why is it that the IRTC animation comp always seems so under-entered but the
>>stills typically has loads of entries?
> 
> 
> I can think of a lot of reasons that have very little to do with the
> competition itself:
> 
> * Animation is hard. Good animation is harder.

And designing a model that is easily animated is harder.  AFAIK, there 
is one mesh modeling program that exports an .INC containing a model 
that is posable by POV-Ray SDL.

> * POV doesn't have a GUI for animation.

But the author of the aforementioned app hopes to get that working 
sometime this year...

> * More models have to be made, for multiple scenes.
> * Models have to be articulated for animation, or they break in nasty ways.

Which ties in with the first item.

> * Animation needs a story with a beginning, middle and end.
> * Render times are much higher, because you need 24 frames for one second.

This is, indeed, the killer.  The stills side frequently has pictures 
that takes days to render.  One hour per frame limits animation entries 
to 90 seconds of animation, tops, minus one second for every day spent 
in modeling or test animating, or not rendering because nothing's ready 
for final render.

A lot of Rusty was rendered while I've been at work or asleep.

> Additionally:
> 
> * There aren't many free animation programs.
> * Animation programs have a large learning curve.
> * It's hard to compete against professional animation packages.
> 
> Now, John VanSickle scored all the animation rounds last year using "pure"
> POV-Ray, even against Markus Altendorff's excellent animations, which used
> Maxxon 3D. So take three with a grain of salt.

It's true that everything was rendered by POV-Ray, but two models were 
done with my modeler instead of hand-written SDL code.  One model 
probably could have been done with SDL code, but the other one 
definitely required my modeler.

> On the other hand, there were a number of submissions I was surprised to
> find didn't even make Honorable Mention:
> 
>    - Leroy Whetstone/October-January 2006
>    - M.A.c.v./October-January 2006
>    - Nimish Ajmani/July-October 2006
> 
> So why didn't these get Honorable Mentions? It's because the scoring doesn't
> actually follow the above guidelines.

And because due to low turnout, there haven't been Honorable Mentions 
since the April-July 2005 round.

Many of the times this has happened, there have been only six entries 
(or fewer).  The first time this happened, there was grumbling because 
it guaranteed that everyone would get at least an H.M., which did not 
sit well with some people.

> What if (like John VanSickle and his
> LionSnake modeler) you've actually written your own modeler or animator?
> Should you get extra points for that?

No, I should get a lifetime supply of Diet Coke!

> Making Honorable Mention a bit easier to get into might help (i.e. adding a
> "cheap tool" or "newbie" bonus), but that's awfully subjective.
> 
> Anyway, these can be factors in discouraging someone who submitted from
> submitting again. But I'm guessing the biggest barrier to people submitting
> animations in the first place is still my first point: Animation is Hard.

Yup.

Regards,
John

Post a reply to this message

>> * POV doesn't have a GUI for animation.

> But the author of the aforementioned app hopes to get that working
> sometime this year...

Heh. I wondered when you'd add that to LionSnake and join the dark side! ;-)

AFAIK, the early days of Pixar animation used a POV=SDL sort of approach.
They have a proprietary interface called 'Marionette.' Characters were
rigged with 'avars' (articulation variables), and characters were animated
using a spreadsheet sort of interface. Time (in frames) ran along the 'x'
axis, and 'avars' on the 'y' axis. To animate a character, you could either
click in a cell and enter a value, or click a cell and drag the mouse to
change the cell value.

A lot's changed since then, although if you check out the 'extras' in "The
Incredibles" video, you can see that same interface is being used.

There are only a handful of free animation programs that are capable of
supporting the features that are needed for character animation - bones,
morphs, and so on. By their nature, most have a pretty steep learning
curve. Although it's subjective, it's generally safe to say that the more
features an application has, the more difficult it is to learn.

Problematically, most don't support POV. Here are the ones that I'm aware
of:

* Blender: Very functional. They've added an internal raytracer as well as
export to Yafray and Sunflow, so I don't know if POV is supported anymore.

* Art of Illusion: This is another nice program, written in Java. It has
it's own advanced raytracer, so there's no export to POV.

* Anim8or: Pretty easy to use, and more animation functionality has been
added. Because of licensing issues, POV is not supported.

* K3D: Renderman only. I've never seen an animation done with this.

In the 'beta' category, I'll add the following, since they both support POV:

* JPatch: Still in beta. Exports to POV for rendering, not POV-SDL.

* LionSnake: Still in development.

So not only is animation hard, but animation using POV is harder, because
it's decades behind other programs. It'll be interesting to see how
LionSnake turns out.

Personally, I'm using JPatch, but with Inyo (my own raytracer) instead of
POV. You've got to eat your own dogfood, right?

Post a reply to this message

David Cuny wrote:
>>>* POV doesn't have a GUI for animation.
> 
>>But the author of the aforementioned app hopes to get that working
>>sometime this year...
> 
> Heh. I wondered when you'd add that to LionSnake and join the dark side! ;-)

I've been scheming it for a while (since 2003 at least).

> AFAIK, the early days of Pixar animation used a POV=SDL sort of approach.
> They have a proprietary interface called 'Marionette.' Characters were
> rigged with 'avars' (articulation variables), and characters were animated
> using a spreadsheet sort of interface. Time (in frames) ran along the 'x'
> axis, and 'avars' on the 'y' axis. To animate a character, you could either
> click in a cell and enter a value, or click a cell and drag the mouse to
> change the cell value.
> 
> A lot's changed since then, although if you check out the 'extras' in "The
> Incredibles" video, you can see that same interface is being used.

Been there, done that, still considering the idea.  My present ambition 
is to have that view and the scene view, and to allow edits in either 
view, with the edit being translated over to the other view.  I hope it 
works.

> There are only a handful of free animation programs that are capable of
> supporting the features that are needed for character animation - bones,
> morphs, and so on. By their nature, most have a pretty steep learning
> curve.

My hope is to have a user interface with one rule:  "When in doubt, 
right-click."  The idea is that a right-click should bring up a context 
menu that covers everything the user can do with the object over which 
the mouse pointer is hovering at the time.  The features can be accessed 
in other ways, true, but the learning curve is simplified if newbies 
have one-stop shopping for their info.

> * LionSnake: Still in development.

And I made a design decision a couple weeks ago that's going to delay 
things.  For some reason I decided that supporting only 3- and 4-sided 
faces was too limiting, so I'm adding support for faces with unlimited 
number of sides[1].  This means:

*  Just about every function that deals with faces has to be rewritten[2];
*  The save format has to be changed [3];
* My surface subdivision macros have to be completely rewritten, because 
the export POV SDL files use the macros [4].

So except for bugfixes to the current version (1.6), there won't be 
anything released in a while.

Regards,
John

[1] Well, okay, the number of sides for a given face is limited to 
32767.  You got a problem with that?

[2] I still have to rewrite the functions to subdivide a portion of the 
mesh; split edges; and to join two vertices together.  The subdivision 
preview is back down to one preview step, and the child faces are flat, 
not smoothed, to the results are still kind of rough.  And of course all 
of the file operations have to be rewritten to support the new features, 
too.

[3] I decided to abandon the save format I developed (since the world 
really did not need a new 3d model format) and have the app use OBJ and 
MTL files for saving and loading geometry and texturing data; the 
animation data will go into a separate file, format to be determined. 
As I write this I am downloading a spec that uses XML :P, but if it's 
too complicated, or if I don't like the way it supports things, I won't 
use it.

[4] This is because the modified Loop scheme I'm presently using doesn't 
support the higher-sided faces.  The Catmull-Clark scheme supports any 
number of sides in a face, so that's what will be forthcoming.

Post a reply to this message