Sophie-Croquet Trailer

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Daniel Lanovaz has sent a message to the squeak-dev mailing list. I’ve reproduced it verbatim below the fold. Fun stuff.

A short animated history book with a Sophie-Croquet theme is here:

http://web.mac.com/iphone2007/iWeb/Sophie-Croquet/Trailer%20HD.html

It is best to have your surround-sound stereo system
ready to rumble.

Enjoy,
Daniel

=======================================================

I created the animation to tip my hat to all the
people who spend their time, talents, and energy
working on Squeak/Croquet/Sophie et al. Keep up
the great work.

The industry is at an exciting time where
graphic arts, Hollywood special effects software,
gaming engines, real-time ray tracing algorithms,
and multi-core (parallel) hardware combine to bring
some amazing advances to not only story-telling and
education, but general purpose computing interfaces.

This animation uses ray-tracing as the rendering
technique, particle emitters and hypervoxels
for the meteor, smoke, and sun flares, and an
inverse-kinematics constraint system for David L.’s
bone movement. Mesh weight maps are used to warp and
curve both the character’s mesh as well as the book’s
pages and stargate.

I generated portions of this sequence for a
trailer of an animation I will be showing at a
fundraising event this October/2007 for Loma Prieta
Elementary and Middle Schools in the Los Gatos
mountains, California (to offset a reduction in
state funding).

David L. is a friend of mine and a Fellow at AMD/ATI
working on the next generation multi-core cpu/gpu
engines. I’m hoping for some interesting products from
AMD/ATI over the coming years, as well as Intel and
nVidia.

It will be interesting to watch the software folks
harnessing this multi-billion dollar investment in
silicon and copper.