Through the Eyes of a Child

Through the Eyes of a Child : A History

In 1997, the administrators of The Internet Raytracing Competition started discussing the possibility of adding an animation competition to go along with the stills (pictures) competition.
As part of my effort to evaluate the feasibility of making animations using available tools, I wrote an animation of a locomotive going around a circle of track. I modeled the loco after the one Marlene made for our home page.

In 1999, we bought a house and I modeled it in POV-Ray so that Marlene could get an idea of what my new home office addition above the garage would look like. I decided to add music to my little video and selected a 16 minute 43 second piece that Stu and I had written and played. That's an awfully long piece of music, but it's one of my favorites, and I thought it lent itself well to animating. I just wish it wasn't 17 minutes long. :)

In 2003, I mailed DVDs of the animation out for Christmas presents, with about 5 minutes of animation done.

In 2005, I re-rendered it fixing just a couple of the broken things. Then I stopped working on it.

In 2015, I decided that I needed to re-render tteoac in a modern video format. My old MPEG-2 just didn't look good compared to "Alpha and Omega 4" (which is about as cheap of a modern computer animation as you can get). Hello 480p mp4! (I can't wait to do the 1080p version.) While I was at it, I decided to do some work on it, including making a downloadable version and setting up this web page.

In 2017 I had time and an itch and I finished 3 more minutes of video.

Through the Eyes of a Child : Toolshed

There are six primary tools used in the 2015 edition of tteoac.

• POV-Ray Programmatically renders a single frame.
• bsac The BuckoSoft Animation Controller manages getting the 8 scenes of 15570 frames rendered.
• tteoacService Manage object position and collision detection for some of tteoac.
• FFmpeg Stitches together frames, an audio track, and chapter marks into a fine video.
• Bash scripts. Copy the 8 scenes of frames (and 8492 black frames) into a linearly numbered pile of 24062 frames and call ffmpeg.
• bsAniPic Rapidly flip through a series of PNGs while displaying the POV-Ray debug for each frame

I have settled on running 480p-23.976fps 'quicky' and 720p-30fps hi-def versions because, more fun with math. I did some tests at 1080p and I don't think ffmpeg is up to encoding for that. Or my PC isn't fast enough to smoothly play that. Either way, I think the 720p version is best.

Through the Eyes of a Child : Toolshed 1998-2003

This is the text that was on the inside cover of the 2003 DVD:

POV-Ray is a very cool tool that generates a single picture, or frame. The input is a text file describing geometric shapes that can be sliced and diced and stretched and combined. (Newer versions of POV-Ray can also do the “traditional” triangle meshes seen in other render packages, but i don't use them in my art.) Remember all of that useless high school algebra and trig? That is the bulk of how to make a POV-Ray picture.

It takes between 30 seconds (the credits) to 12 hours (looking out the back window) to render each frame. The typical frame takes between 10 and 30 minutes, as long as there's no glass in the scene. It takes about 5 months for me to generate the 14744 frames in one go on 8 computers.

The 8 computers in my house run a program I wrote, bsac, (BuckoSoft Animation Controller) that figures out what source files are needed for a single frame, transfers those files, runs POV-Ray and sends the completed picture back to my main computer. POV-Ray uses lots and lots of memory, so bsac needs to be really small. It is written in C++ and runs on Windows and Linux in about half a meg of memory.

Some of the collision detection and motion (volcano spew and Reefer Magnets show) is handled by a Java servlet I wrote. The servlet takes about an hour to generate all of the motions, which are stored in an SQL database. As each frame is generated, one of the source files needed may be a special file requested from the servlet who outputs a POV-Ray source file; kind of like fetching a web page.

TMPGEnc stiches the frames together into MPEG2 scenes.

Ulead VideoStudio 7 is used to combine the scenes and add the audio track.

DVD-lab is used to master the DVD. Lay out the chapters and menus, etc.

B's Recorder GOLD5 finally burns the DVD to disc.

Bonus Content

Here are some test videos I made during the development of tteoac.

	flyingRocksDev	Stream - Download (27 MB)	3m34s
	Building up the FlyingRocks show in the fishtank. Audio track "Free2B" (1992) featuring Stu on rhythm, Dick on lead, and Chris on bass guitars.
	mushroomDev	Stream - Download (69 MB)	2m58s
	The evolution of the mushroom cloud in the kitchen. Audio track "SnowSquall" (1990) featuring Stu on electric and Dick on acoustic guitars.
	lookDownAtLoco	Stream - Download (5 MB)	41s
	Physics test looking down at the loco while it moves through the volcano spew.
	tteoac1	Stream - Download (5 MB)	58s
	Original 1997 video that started it all.

Human Challenge

I am very happy to share my video with you, as long as you are not a spider or a robot; they are relentless at constantly downloading anything they can get. To that end, prove to me that you're human.

	How many spheres are in the picture? Type your answer and click here.

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