Creating the animation took the "spare" time from two weeks of my vacation, and a lot of very late nights, all the while "borrowing" other people's computers to do the work on. (Thanks, guys!) As it was, I had to declare the animation "finished" on 12-30-99, whether or not I was happy with it.
The main part of the animation was written and tested on a Pentium-90 with 40 megs of RAM. There were 26 full-length animation "test renders," which were converted to AVIs to check the quality, anti-aliasing, etc. The last render done on this machine was 133 frames, took approximately 16.5 hours...and ended up being 5,763,056 bytes.
The final renderings, however, were done on a Pentium-233 with 32 megs RAM. It took approximately 6.5 hours to do 144 frames.
The final set of images were used to generate 3 MPG animations, testing playback rates and other settings. I then created the wipe-to-black sequence as a seperate 24-frame animation. (This took under an hour to render.) I then combined the new frames with the old one, copied the previous "last-frame" enough times to make a suitable delay, and "presto!" The animation you saw before! (And, weighing in at only 258,752 bytes, it's only 4.4% of the size...)
All the code used in the animation was written by me specifically for this animation, with the sole exception being the "Object Bender" #include file by Chris Colefax, which I used as the basis for a macro to peel away the calendar pages. (It was a lot harder than I thought it'd be to get that appearance; I ended up with four different "peel-away" methods before I settled on one I liked...)
Some people have told me that they can't read what is written on the pages, so I've re-rendered the following frames at 512x384:
More coming as I think of it...
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