Look Who it Was Random video

Ancient machine (POV-Ray animation, HD & HDRI)

3,703 views · Published 21 December 2010 · 1:51 · Indexed 1 October 2026

Channel: Bisqwit · 2010 · Film & Animation

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This is a visual inspiration about a music soundtrack in Final Fantasy V. I did not add any sound effects; the audio is verbatim from the game's background music.

I modelled and rendered this using POV-Ray, postprocessed using EXR-Utils and PFSTools, in particular using the pfstmo_fattal02 tone-mapping tool. (It is also responsible for the unfortunately pronounced moiré effects on the background).

Originally designed in 2002, refined in 2010. Particles calculated with ODE.

I began this modelling by creating a mathematical map of the music, listing the periodicity of each element of the sound with regards to a global timer (the big pounding sound). Then I translated each periodicity element into a POV-Ray function, and used that function to animate the corresponding visual element in the animation.

Also, it took 7 attempts for me to re-encode and re-upload this video before Youtube finally got it right. Previous encodes were outright rejected (unable to process) or were published at wrong aspect ratio.

I rendered this video at the resolution 1440x1080, 60 fps. Using MEncoder's "tinterlace" filter, the fps was dropped to 30 while the resolution was doubled to 1440x2160 (because Youtube caps fps at 30. This also introduced a motion blur effect). However, when I uploaded this video (after multiple failures), Youtube ignored the aspect ratio setting (4:3) from the stream headers and instead determined it from the resolution (2:3). So I had to double the resolution again, making it 2880x2160 using a Lanczos filter.

The final encode, the one finally accepted by Youtube, was encoded to H.264 format overnight using the following parameters: crf=22:rc_lookahead=32:frameref=15:trellis=2:me=umh:me_range=64
:subq=10:partitions=all:fullrange=on:subme=10:bframes=0:threads=4
This produced a 575 MB MKV for this 111 seconds long video.

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