I'm really surprised your animation was not DQ'd. Allthough it was hilarious, and the first thing I did after seeing it was show my family, then teamates the next day, I still think it [b]should[b] (by the rules) have been DQ'd.

"SuperChicken" is a copyrighted theme song from the late great cartoon.
"Batman" is also copyrighted from the.. you guessed it.. Batman series.

I have a lot of respect for your team, and I did like your animation, however, I feel it is slightly unfair to other teams who had stellar animations but used copyrighted music also got DQ'd while yours stood.

Oh well, unintentional loophole you guys got through. Good luck in the future :)

well i think it was kinda unfair too.... i was tearing my hair out that some teams got DQed after going through the whole animation experience. that would be terrible sorry to all the teams that did get DQed. but i honestly dont know how we made it through. we *did* cut out a part of the batman theme and just loop it, we didnt actually play the batman song... so that mightve worked.. and we only played the superchicken theme during the credits... which may have not been judged. thats my hypothesis. or maybe autodesk was laughing too hard. :D
so we did try to get through a loophole but i personally never thought it would work.
im honored you enjoyed our animation though, thank you very much for the praise and scruples.
good luck in all your future endeavors.
toodles.

So how did you do the cell shading?

oh im sorry your post kinda got wiped out with the addition of the second page.
the cell shading came as a new feature in 3ds max 5 at a material that you applied to your objects, when you create a new material of change material type i believe the material is something like cartoon shading or cell shading or something close to that, and from there you can define the way its outlined (which takes a loooong time by the way, the drawing in of the black lines) and how many levels of paint you want and light etc. so we just applied that material to everything... sometimes more complex like in the case of the buildings we actually overlayed a brick pattern... its all in the max help files if you look under toon shading or whatever the devil its called.
i actually liked your animation more than most... you had some nice modelling and texturing. i never got to watch it with sound so i go pretty confused by the storyline the first few times i watched i thought you splashed to your title page in the middle but then i realized that was the pinball scoreboard. the only real problem i saw with yours is the animation of the ball... you used the default curves (speed of object in motion) when you moved from point a to point b so the ball sped up and slowed down when it reached its target. you can fix that by editing the aforementioned 'curves' by clicking the curve editor icon on the keyframe panel. from there you can change the speed of motion (defined by a plot of the coordinates) from the default parabola like curve to straight lines, which makes constant motion.
thanks for your comments and the high judging at northwestern, i hope i covered all your questions.

Thanks
We used VIZ 3 because we had that on 8 computers in our drafting lab and I used MAX 3.1 for some parts, so i guess that really doesn't help us considering we only have MAX 5 on our engineer's laptop.