13. The Future Hasn’t Happened Yet
Early on in my time at Neo-Visuals I wrote up my thoughts on the future of computer animation and sent them to Jon Peddie, who published an industry newsletter called “The Peddie Report”. My aim was to get feedback, so I was surprised when he simply published my document in the following issue of his report.
The gist of my proposal was that we need to move upwards in abstraction when creating 3D films. The entities we interact with need to move up from animations to puppets to actors. And the creator needs to go from animator to puppeteer to director. I imagined what I called “intelligent objects” which could be directed the way a director directs actors on a set. I called it the Dancer project.
This has yet to become a reality, and I still think it is a good idea, so it is a direction I am keeping in mind while experimenting with my current Common Lisp development. Maybe I should stop waiting and just make the future happen.
As a bonus, the publication of my ideas led to a job offer from Omnibus. A friend there told me “So I’m supposed to find out how much money we need to offer you to come work for us.” Not being career-oriented in my thinking, and out of a sense of loyalty to Neo-Visuals, I turned down the offer with a joke about not wanting to move into a higher tax bracket.
Meanwhile, we were developing and improving the Neo-Visuals software. After I had revamped the renderer, we had hired new developers and worked on the GUI, modeling, and animation portions of the system.
At that juncture, I was introduced to the book “Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach” by Brad Cox, who worked at the company which invented Objective-C, and which Next later purchased. Our UI developer really liked this book, and the result was a robust OO system he developed for our GUI implementation, which was built on top of basic GL. We defined our own classes for buttons, menus, sliders, text views, and windows. The fact that we did this in Fortran made me realize OO is more a way of designing software than just a set of language features.
Speaking of Next, I did get to see Steve Jobs give the keynote address at NCGA (National Computer Graphics Association) 1986. He had just purchased ILM’s computer graphics division, which was renamed Pixar. He said that when he saw what they were working on, he had the same feeling that he had had when he got to see what they were doing at Xerox PARC.
Design & Code
This listing shows the new force-field classes, and the code which generates the image at the top of the post.
I realized that in the previous version of the dynamics-animator code, the noise was being applied as a displacement field (affecting the particle positions directly) whereas now the noise contributes to the force on the particles.
This explains the difference in shape characteristics between this and the previous image. Now the noise-as-force has a longer term effect, as it accumulates in the particle’s velocity. This causes larger deviations from the initial Y axis direction.
