Wine bottle woodsman

This is a 30-second commercial-style animation I want to make. I've got a script, storyboards, and some rough timings. I would like to include as much interesting motion as possible, such as flocking birds and sloshing liquid.

I started the project a few years ago (like around 1995) when I used an Amiga. Here are some pictures from then. Here are some renders by Imagine. I made these on my Amiga 2000 a long time ago.

Here are some renders by POV-Ray from around January 1997.

This is the the bottle shape against some clouds. I kept this because I can make Absolut Vodka ad parodies out of it.

Here's an accident where the bottle cast no shadow. Only the label did.

The fingers merge together.

Here's one of the odd trees. A Perl script generates the recursive shape. POV-Ray did the rendering, using its blob objects.

Nice hands. I forgot to put checkerboard on the fingers, and POV-Ray made the texture dissolve between the blob components.

This is an older version of the interface. You can see the preview on the right and the matching rendered image on the left. The gray box has all the axis of motion.

Interestingly (to me), a similar UI issue came up on my lighting control system. Just like this very old tcl/tk program could map joystick axes to channels, the light9 system we used in summer 2002 could map 4 external sliders to submasters. We handled the UI differently in light9.

Then I rebuilt everything in POV-Ray (around 1998). Here are some newer pictures.

For the most control, I'll probably move the whole thing to Renderman and render with the Blue Moon Rendering Tools.

8/27/2002 - Wouldn't that be nice. But Exluna pulled BMRT. So maybe I'll keep sitting on this project until povray has a complete shader system, and then use povray.