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This animation of a Stirling engine (113 seconds, 2841 frames, sound, 4.8 MByte)
was a birthday present in June 1993 for a colleague of mine, Thomas.
It was one week's work and a few all-nights to build and render it.
The animated shades at the end of the animation had been a reference to Thomas' work on daylighting at FhG-ISE in 1992/3.
As of today, Thomas has his own company manufacturing Stirling engines and other projects.
The spline camera path was done with my previewer rshow for the
Radiance
ray-tracer, the rendering itself was done with the
Rayshade
ray-tracer, which added motion blur easily.
Note that the gears and their teeth, including the Epicyclic gearing, actually do fit. Thanks to a ''gear-generator'' program written by me.
The films were rendered with PAL resolution (768x576 pixel) on 25 UNIX Hewlett-Packard HP7xx workstations in parallel.
Single frame recorded to a SONY Laserdisc LVR6000 using the FhG-ISE Silicon-Graphics VGX VideoLab hardware, and then transfered from the analog
Laser-disc to VHS-S tape. It got finished well within time: 2 hours before the birthday breakfast.
Special thanks to FhG-ISE for sparing a few CPU cycles in 1993, and to Peter Jägle, FhG-ISE IT, for encouragement and support back then.
Arriving at the breakfast place with an unexpected video tape recorder tugged under one arm and a TV under the other, I initially excused
these as ''I don't want to leave them in the car''.
It was received rather well then.
It was also shown to Fraunhofer ''top-brass'' at a meeting in 1993, with positive feedback.
It had ''Welcome To The Machine" by Pink-Floyd as soundtrack, which times nicely.
Obviously I can't distribute the animation here with copyrighted sound.
Secondly, only this very low resolution version has survived of the original rendering. Probably there still exists an archive of the frames on
a Magneto-Optical disc somewhere in the vaults of FhG-ISE, unbeknownst to anyone working there now and very likely impossible to read
over thirty years later anyway.
Remember - it 1993 we were proud to have a RAID-0 of 4x 2GB SCSI discs at the VGX, offering the ''enormous'' capacity of 8GB for renderings.
Copyright of models and animation by Peter Apian-Bennewitz.
Other data sources given in the credits at the end of the animation.
Originally the digital version used MPEG-1 encoding.
Mplex's analysis of this stream is available, as well as SGI's
dmconvert output.
The current digital version was converted by ffmpeg to webm format. Thanks folks for ffmpeg !