Awesome, way to go!

My favorate part was that the Croquet halos were in the real world  
(at least of the lil guy in the video).  I've often wished I had  
Halos for objects in the universe, and once or twice have even  
thought that automatically, unbidden. Like "it's sure dark in here...  
no matter!  i'll just bring up an inspector..." :D

Regards,
Aaron

On May 27, 2007, at 11:33 PM, Daniel Lanovaz wrote:

> 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.
>