Screen Shot

This month we will look at the making of the short three-dimensional film by team Themis called Themis Unstoppable. Themis Unstoppable is team Themis' entry for the Autodesk Award for Excellence in Engineering, Creativity and Communication at the FIRST competition in Florida this year (1998). It is awarded to the team who clearly and creatively presents design solutions through computer modeling and animation using the software provided by Autodesk.

The group of Mills High School students who made this year's entry for team Themis are Brian Chan, Anthony Lee, Jason Wong, Angela Tiao, Billy Allan, and Ronny Chatterjee. Brian Chan came up with the story and drew the storyboards for the film. The plot of Themis Unstoppable is that team Themis has made it to the final round of FIRST competition and is playing against the fictional character "Coogah". "Coogah" plays the villain in the film; he uses his robot to block team Themis' robot from scoring. When all looks lost for team Themis, Eric Park the controller of team Themis' robot in the film presses a button that causes a platform on the robot to move forward and thus be able to score and win. The film ends with a shot of "Coogah" hitting his controller and Eric celebrating his victory.

Brain Chan, Anthony Lee, and Jason Wong created the NURBS curve, surface, and solid modeling for the animation using the software program Rhinoceros® by Robert McNeel & Associates (http://www.rhino3D.com/) which is in beta release. They also set up the action sequences using the software program 3D Studio MAX® R2 by Kinetix (http://www.ktx.com/) which retails for $3495.00 but was provided to teams in the FIRST competition. Brain Chan, Anthony Lee, and Jason Wong are all seniors in high school all spent many hours modeling objects for the animation until they approached perfection. Angela Tiao and Billy Allan did the other side of the film, the music. They both worked tirelessly to create the original score for the film and played the song for digital recording in a wave file on Billy's MIDI equipped keyboard. They created a whimsical yet dramatic musical peace that plays along with the action sequence. Ronny Chatterjee was the Resource Specialist. It was his job to make sure that the rest of the animation group had everything they needed to create a high quality animation. He found software the group needed and was able to get access to a Unisys (http://www.unisys.com/) Aquanta QS/6 quad-processor server to use for the rendering of this complex animation. He also created a very rough motion test of the robot for people to get an idea of how the robot would move in the animation.

The process of creating the animation went smoothly until the very last weekend before it was due. The animation was due on Monday and they were still making action sequences on Saturday. It wasn't until Saturday evening that they got to the Unisys building where the computer they were going to render on was. They spent an hour setting up the computer for Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 and Kinetix 3D Studio MAX® R2 before the first frames could be rendered. They were there until about 8:00pm when they decided to go home, but before leaving they set up a particularly long sequence to render overnight. The next was their final day to render; they would have to have the animation ready to go by the next morning. They started rendering at 10:00am and were there until 11:45pm when they copied the last frames onto a DDS-2 tape and left for Ronny Chatterjee's home. At his home Brain Chan, Anthony Lee, and Jason Wong quickly went to their car to gather the renderings from their personal computers. They decided to meet at Eric Park's house for the final editing of the film and music. At was at this time that Ronny Chatterjee found out that his tape drive wasn't working correctly so he and his father made a mad dash back to Unisys to "borrow" a tape drive from them. Thankfully the tape drive worked and they were able to restore the rendered Targa files to hard disk so that it could copied a CD-R. At this point it was 4:00am, the final CD-R wasn't finished until 8:00am. All breathed a sigh of relief when the animation was finally finished.

At the competition the team's animation was disqualified because they did not submit the animation in AVI format as stated in a team update that the group never received, the team had incorrectly submitted their animation in Targa format. Consequently Team 151 - Sanders, Lockheed Martin and Nashua High School of Nashua, NH won the award with a less then stellar animation in comparison to team Themis' entry in our opinion. Appeals to Autodesk were to no avail, but team Themis vows to win next year. The 3D animation Themis Unstoppable is available for download from the samples page in avi format.

Anthony Lee previews the animation