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
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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.