Internet Ray Tracing Competition Rules (Animations)

Version of October 1998

Here you will find a guide to what is allowed, what is required, and what is "in the spirit of the competition".

Contents

1. Summary
2. Etiquette
3. Acceptable tools
4. Submissions
5. Animation File
6. Text File
7. Movie Poster
8. FTP Submissions
9. Email Submissions
10. Web Submissions
11. Judging and prizes

Summary

1. Create an animation which is your interpretation of the topic for the current competition. We strongly suggest making a single entry per round, but will accept more.
2. You may use any rendering program(s) to make your animation.
3. You may use paint programs, image editors or similar programs to change the frames of your animation after rendering. Some notes about this rule:
   • This is different from the stills competition rule, where such post-processing is prohibited.
   • The focus of the animation should be 3D rendered images, so use these effects with caution, or the judges will punish you.
4. The only limit on the animation is the file size, which must be five megabytes (5,242,880 bytes) or less. We do suggest prudence when selecting frame size, and recommend 320x240.
5. You must include a specially formatted text file explaining how you made your animations, and if possible a Zip archive file containing the source files for them. We have a template text file and an example text file available at our ftp-site (ftp.irtc.org/pub/anims).
6. You can send us your entries by ftp (ftp.irtc.org/pub/anims/incoming), by email (irtc-submit-anims@irtc.org), or via the web (http://www.irtc.org/cgi-bin/irtc_submit_anims).
7. Please read the copyright which applies to all submissions (available in our ftp site, ftp.irtc.org/pub).
8. Winners are chosen by a public vote. Winners receive prizes donated by our sponsors.

Etiquette

This describes the intentions of the competition and what we hope to gain from it.
1. This is an open competition. We want to encourage everyone to put thought into the descriptions that are put into the text file. We hope that knowledge and techniques can be passed from peer to peer in this way.
2. It is strongly recommended that you submit a Zip archive containing some or all of the source files for public use. However, we understand those who need to protect their work from exploitation, and do not require this. You may include whatever you think necessary or helpful in this file, and there is no size restriction, but please remember that hard disk space is not infinite.
3. The competition is not about winning. You do not have to be a professional, or even any good! Experts are welcome, but the contest is run by and for amateurs with cheap tools. Those lucky enough to have more impressive skills and equipment are asked to share their wisdom, but we are more impressed by someone who can be creative with what they have, than someone who has everything.
4. The IRTC reserves the right to reject and remove any submission, at any time, for any reason.
5. Finally, these rules exist primarily to make the task of running the competition more manageable, and as automatic as possible. The organizers spend considerable time running the event, so please help them and stick to the rules.

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Acceptable Tools

This describes what software and hardware you may use.
1. You may use any hardware. We recommend computers! Scanners, digitizers, and motion-capture are all acceptable.
2. Any rendering and animation conversion programs are acceptable. The competition welcomes the use of cheap or free software rather than packages only available to a few professionals. There is nothing wrong with using such software.
3. Any support software is acceptable. The use of lparsers, add-on modelers, texture editors, and landscape generators is fine. Paint programs may be used to modify the individual frame images, but do so prudently. If you do post-process your images, you must describe what you've done in your text description file.
4. You may use objects and textures downloaded from the internet or purchased commercially, but it is not encouraged. Similarly you may use other people's images as image-maps or textures within your own work. In all cases, you must get permission from the creator of the object or image. If you use such objects or images, you must make this known with proper acknowledgments in the text file accompanying your submission. You may not violate copyrights of any sort.

Submissions

This describes what a submission should look like. Once you have the files of your submission together, you can send them to the IRTC via email, ftp, or the web.
1. A submission must contain an MPEG-1 animation file with the .mpg file-name extension (e.g. "foo.mpg"). See the [Animation File] section.
2. A submission must contain a specially formatted text file with the .txt file-name extension. (e.g. "foo.txt") See the [Text File] section.
3. A submission must contain a "movie poster" JPEG image with the .jpg file-name extension. (e.g. "foo.jpg") See the [Movie Poster] section.
4. A submission may contain a Zip archive with the .zip file-name extension (e.g. "foo.zip"); this is optional but encouraged.
5. The Zip file may contain any relevant material, such as source files, image maps and so forth.
6. All files in a submission must have the same base-name. Meaning that the first part of the files you submit (the part before the extension) must all be completely identical. For example: clocks.mpg, clocks.jpg, clocks.txt, and clocks.zip.
7. The base-name should be 8 characters or less, and may only contain numbers ("0..9") and letters ("a..z") and underscores ("_"). Case is not preserved. All entries will be made to conform to this standard. Non-standard characters will be removed from names, all extra characters will be chopped off, and all uppercase characters will be made lowercase. These are ISO-9660 (CD-ROM) naming restrictions.
8. Your entry will be renamed if it conflicts with an existing entry's name. To ensure your name is unique, you may want to look to see what names people have already used. A common name collision avoidance technique is to use your initials as the first few characters of your base-name.
9. Submissions must be uploaded by the deadline.

If your submission is acceptable, you will be sent email which states that your submission was accepted. If your submission is unacceptable, you will be sent email describing what was wrong with your submission. If you make a submission, but do not get email back within twenty-four hours confirming it, chances are something went wrong--contact the IRTC admins.

You will not get email (and your submission will not be accepted) if you do not include a properly-formatted and valid email address in your text file.

When you get email from the Submission Analyzer, look through it for any warnings or errors that your submission may have generated. Errors indicate that your submission was rejected--you will have to resubmit. Warnings indicate that your submission does not quite fit the recommended guidelines for a submission, but it was accepted regardless.

If you submit an entry successfully, but before the deadline has passed you wish to change it, send mail to the admins telling them which entry you wish to replace. We do not encourage this (please get it right the first time!) but can accomodate special circumstances.

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Animation File

This describes what makes an animation acceptable.
1. Only MPEG-1 format animation files are acceptable. "I", "P", and "B" frames are permitted.
2. The MPEG file must be less than 5mb (5,242,880 bytes) in size.
3. The MPEG file may have any frame size or frame count. We recommend frames of 320x240 pixels, however, based on current widespread hardware and software limitations.
4. MPEG audio streams are allowed in the animation file, but not everyone will be able to hear them; also remember that judges are instructed to focus on the rendered animation. For the time being, audio streams will probably be just a waste of space.
5. All animations must be original. You may not use another person's individual image frames or animation sequence(s) with or without their permission. You may not use an animation that you created in the past. You may of course re-use good ideas and even objects from past images or animations that you have created.
6. Animations must be relevant to the competition's topic. Usually, the judges will have the final say about "relevance".
7. Frame images may be enhanced or altered ("post-processed") by use of paint programs such as PhotoShop(tm) etc. Common uses of this type of processing:
   1. You may add text information (name, title, email address, copyright. etc...) to your animation, usually in the form of opening or trailing credits.
   2. You may gamma-correct, scale, or contrast/brightness adjust the frames.
   3. You may retouch the frames at will. However, excessive use of this sort of processing will doubtless cause some judges to deduct points, since the focus of the competition is rendered animations.
   Experience has shown that hand-retouching individual frames turns out to be counter-productive. It is usually best to discover a way to make your renderer produce the desired effect. In any case, all use of post-processing must be documented in your text file.

Format of text file

This describes the special format of the required text file that must accompany all submissions.
1. The text file must have a line which starts with the word "EMAIL:" and then is followed by a valid email address.
2. The text file must have a line which starts with the word "NAME:" and then is followed by the author's name.
3. The text file must have a line which starts with the word "TOPIC:" and then is followed by the topic for which this submission is being made.
4. The text file must have a line which consists of these words: "COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT." By adding this line the author is agreeing to the copyright which the IRTC uses for all submission. Please read the copyright.
5. There are several other optional fields that we would like to encourage that you add to your text file. They are
   • TITLE
   • WEBPAGE
   • COUNTRY
   • RENDERER USED
   • TOOLS USED
   • CREATION TIME
   • VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS
   • HARDWARE USED
   • ANIMATION DESCRIPTION, and
   • DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED

Here is how it all should look: (<>'s should be replaced with your own words)

EMAIL: <your@email.address>
NAME: <Your Name>
TOPIC: <The Topic of the competition you are entering>
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: <The Title of your animation>
COUNTRY: <Your country or region--optional!>
WEBPAGE: <A web page where people might find out more about you or your animation>
RENDERER USED: <povray 2.2 or 3.02, 3DS, BMRT, etc.>
TOOLS USED: <tools such as font3d, torpatch, povsb, cmpeg, mpeg_encode, etc.>
CREATION TIME: <total time your animation took to render and convert, if you kept track>
HARDWARE USED: <Pentium? Sparc? SGI?>
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:
<any tips or notes for viewing your animation in its best form; what hardware and viewer software you used, etc.>
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
<anything you want to say about your animation>
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
<Description of how you created your animation, what techniques you used, etc..>


The FIRST FOUR lines, EMAIL, NAME, TOPIC and COPYRIGHT MUST be filled in correctly. The others are optional but strongly recommended.

The email address MUST BE VALID. If you get anything right, get this one part right - if you don't, the automated submission script will not be able to tell you what went wrong.

We have a template text file and an example text file available at our ftp-site (ftp.irtc.org:/pub/anims).

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Movie Poster

This describes the "movie poster" still image you must submit along with your animation.
1. Your animation file must be accompanied by a 320x240-pixel JPEG image file, which will act as a place-holder for the animation file on web pages and so forth. The size is fixed--the image cannot be larger or smaller.
2. Any tools may be used to produce the poster image. The simplest way is to select one frame from your animation, scale it to 320x240 if necessary, and convert it to JPEG.
3. More elaborate posters are allowed, but you should not spend too much time on the poster image. We would prefer that you spend your time on the animation itself. The judges will be instructed to rate the animation, not the poster.

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FTP Submissions

This describes how to send your submission to the IRTC using a File Transfer Protocol client, or ftp program.
1. Simply connect your ftp program to the host ftp.irtc.org, then select the /pub/anims/incoming directory. (ftp://ftp.irtc.org/pub/anims/incoming)
2. Transfer your text file in ASCII mode.
3. Transfer your MPEG, JPEG, and zip files in binary mode.
4. To confirm transfer check the size of the files after you have uploaded them.

Email Submissions

This describes how to send your submission to the IRTC using electronic mail (email).
1. Your ".mpg", ".txt", ".jpg", and optional ".zip" files may accompany your email message as MIME attachments. Most Internet email programs which support attachments use MIME. If you use attachments, you may attach one, two, three, or all four files to any given email message.
   NOTE: Do not insert your ".txt" file into the body of your message. It must be attached in the same way your animation, poster, and zip-file are attached.
2. Your ".mpg", ".txt", ".jpg", and optional ".zip" files may be uuencoded and inserted into the body of separate email messages. Only the first uuencoded file in the body of a message is used, so each uuencoded file must be in a different message. The multiple messages which make up a submission (at least three, one for the ".mpg" file, one for the ".txt" file, and one for the ".jpg", and optionally a fourth for the ".zip" file) must be sent close together in time--they all must arrive within an hour of each other or they will look like an incomplete submission and be rejected. This isn't usually a problem, but try to avoid sending some files before lunch and the other ones afterward!
   NOTE: Do not insert your ".txt" file into the body of any of these messages as plain text. If you use the uuencoding method of submission, the ".txt" file must also be uuencoded.
3. Either of these two submission techniques may be used, but they may not be combined, at least in the same message. If you attach something to a message and also insert a uuencoded file into the body, the uuencoded file will be ignored.
4. All other submission rules apply to email submissions. They are treated exactly the same as ftp submissions, except for the way they get to the competition site.
5. The email address for competition submissions is irtc-submit-anims@irtc.org.

Web Submissions

This describes how to send your submission to the IRTC using a World Wide Web browser.
1. Set your web browser to this page: http://www.irtc.org/cgi-bin/irtc_submit_anims.
2. Follow the prompts.

Judging and Prizes

This describes how animations will be judged, how winners will be chosen, and how prizes will be allocated. This provides information for competitors, not rules on how to vote. See the voting pages for more details.
1. After the deadline, all accepted animations will be made available to the Internet via web pages and ftp.
2. Voting will be done via email, ftp, or the web, with voting forms available via ftp or through a web interface.
3. Judging will be done by following the rules set forth in the Voting Rules page.
4. After a certain time-period, the votes will be tallied and winners will be selected.
5. There will be three winners, 1st, 2nd and 3rd. These will receive prizes at the discretion of the IRTC admin team.

Good luck, and have fun!

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