NCC-1701-D ENTERING SPACEDOCK
                         by Maurice Molyneaux
                        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
 
TITLE:      SPACEDOK.SEQ
ARTIST:     Maurice Molyneaux
DATE:       1990
RIGHTS:     This animation may be distributed freely as long as this
            text accompanies all copies of the animation and the
            artist's initials are not removed from the animation.
FILE TYPE:  Cyber Paint .SEQ (sequence) file
PLAYBACK:   Cyber Paint or AnimateX program (Atari ST)
            Autodesk Animator (IBM PC)
 
 
THE ANIMATION
 
This animation depicts the Galaxy Class U.S.S. Enterprise entering a
spacedock.  The view is from within the dock, looking at the open doors
through which the Enterprise enters.  The flyby is nice enough, but the
real point of this otherwise tedious exercise was to create a realistic
"shadow" element, which you will notice (how could you not?) as the ship
passes from the bright light outside the dock into the shadowy dock
interior.  The shadow rolls realistically across the ship.
 
Playing this animation backwards or in pong-pong mode looks good as well.
 
 
HOW-TO
 
The animation was created using several programs.  The Enterprise was a
3-D model constructed in Cyber Sculpt (it's a 53K object) and the flyby
pass of it was rendered with CAD-3D (using a Cyber Control script).  Two
separate passes of the starship were rendered, one with bright lighting
the second with dim lighting.  In the "dim" version the starship model was
moded through a "matte block" which represented the terminator between
the internal and external lighting.  The "matte" was separated out using
Cyber Paint, and then the two ship elements were matted together, shadow
pass over bright.  Finally, a picture of the spacedock interior and
starfield were underlain under the animation, and a small "patch" of
spacedock wall overlain on top of the entire mess so that the Enterprise
didn't fly in FRONT of the wall it was passing behind!
 
If you think this sounds complicated, don't worry... it is.  The rendering
took over 16 hours on the Enterprise shadow pass alone!
 
 
MEMORY
 
This IS a sizable but not unreasonable file.  It will load on any ST or TT
computer provided it has a least 1-meg of RAM.  Although the animation
itself in under 512K I am not certain if it will load on a 512K machine. 
It MIGHT if you have nothing else in memory except the ANIMATEx.PRG
 
 
I can be contacted on DELPHI by sending mail to MAURICEM.