Movies
Only a few movies are currently available (in RealVideo format). The ones that aren't available - I thought they looked neat even in the stills! The quality of the movies
is a little worse than the original AVI files, but they're much smaller files for downloading and RealVideo seems to be a good standard to use on the Internet - they can be viewed on Macs and PCs.
One of the benefits of raytracing animations is that the animation is extremely fluid; on the other hand, each frame has to be rendered separately! That's why they're so small - 320x240 resolution, or a little over four times the area of the animated M at the top of this page. Because of color reduction, bands may appear on some
of the screenshots on this page.
Note: In addition to the movies on this page, there are a few semi-realistic terrain flyover-type animations in the Movies section of my Camera Path Editor page.
Most of the animations available require the (free) RealPlayer. It can be downloaded from Real.Com.
Hang Glider An experimental movie. The background (canyon) frames were all rendered in Terragen using a script created by my Camera Path Editor, only with all the banking information removed. The frames generated by Terragen were then used as image maps in POV-Ray and the hang glider placed in front. I wrote a Perl program to extract the banking
information and used it sequentially inside of POV-Ray to roll the hang glider correctly. Not incredibly realistic; it's the concept that counts!
HANGLIDE.BIK 90-frame, 320x240 Bink-encoded movie file. (This requires the Bink player.)
Virus! A virus (T4) attacking a vaguely bacterial-looking thing. It may not be exactly biologically correct, but it's dramatic and that's all that counts. The final scene is good, too - after the bacterium breaks open the 200 baby viruses (virii?) come spinning and splattering out all over the place. (It was heck trying to control all those little guys at once.) I don't
want to know how many frames of animation this took, but it's spliced together from 10 different scenes. And yes, this is based on a real virus!
VIRUS.RM 68-second RealVideo file. Size: 1.2 megs. (Not a streaming version, just save the file to disk and view it with the RealPlayer.)
Journey to the Moon Actually four different animations blended into one movie: the ship taking off from Earth, a shot from space of the ship coming towards the camera, a ship's-eye-view as it heads to the moon, and a scene on the moon. This has over 600 frames of animation, all rendered separately.
JOURNEY.RM 38-second RealVideo file. Size: 712kb. (Not a streaming version, just save the file to disk and view it with the RealPlayer.)
Support the Irish Space Program!
Galaxy Flyby A cheesy-looking spaceship flying past earth and into a slowly-rotating galaxy. Everything in this scene is animated - the sun sparkles, the clouds rotate, the earth rotates, the galaxy rotates, the rocket rotates (as it moves)...
The original uncompressed AVI was very smooth and, in 16 million colors, it looked exactly like the original files did after they were rendered (all 480 of them). Of course, the file was also at 100+ megs. MPEG compression cut this down to 3.54 megs (3%). RealVideo compression
cut this down further to 345kb (9% of the MPG's size, 0.3% of the AVI's size). The compression is painfully visible even when encoded in RealVideo at the highest bandwidth and set to "smoothest video," but here it is:
GALAXYFLY.RM 20-second RealVideo file. Size: 345kb. (Not a streaming version, since the Internet isn't fast enough to handle it. Just save the file to disk and view it with the RealPlayer.)
Bullet through Glass An animation of a bullet striking a goblet and shattering it. This doesn't really take all the physics into account, but it looks realistic enough. File size: 745 kb.
Jupiter Flyby A voyager-type craft spinning its way past Jupiter, with a shining sun in the background. (The only thing better than a lens flare is an animated lens flare!) File size: 859 kb.
Bullet through Glass...Plate Like the other, but the camera tracks slightly behind the bullet until it hits the glass plate, and then pans around to see the particles in motion. I made a slight mistake
with this one - some of the glass chunks disappear in a strange way. And the shards of glass are all shaped like squares. (Maybe it's safety glass?) File size: 744 kb.
Canyon Flying under a bridge and through a canyon. The water looks really...watery. Nice smooth animation. File size: 745 kb.
Sine Wave A real sine wave! Made with an include program I wrote for POV-Ray. File size: 745 kb.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe Ummmm... Bluish metallic stuff coming out of a pipe and puddling on the ground. Exciting. I made the pipe with a 3-D freeform editor called sPatch. File size: 769 kb.
Drinking Fountain A drinking fountain spitting out what looks like blue gelatin. I think the gravity's a bit too low, too. Let's pretend it's water. File size: 746 kb.
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This page created and maintained by Sean O'Malley.