Very Nice Daniel!!

Ron Teitelbaum
Squeak News Team Leader

> From: Daniel Lanovaz
> 
> 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.