16. Phone Call From Montreal
I had, at some point, crossed paths in Toronto with a very bright software developer out of the University of Waterloo. Mike Sweeney specialized in developing rendering software, especially ray tracing. That was his thing, and he was good at it.
Mike had made an impressive short film called “Crater Lake” while at Waterloo, and had developed rendering software for Robert Abel and Associates, which was a glitzy outfit known for several visually striking CG commercials during the 80’s: “Brilliance”, “Benson & Hedges”, and the unaired “Hawaiian Punch”. I recall single-framing those commercials on a half-inch U-Matic video tape deck, examining each frame.
In the spring of 1988, I was laid off (down-sized, made redundant, whatever the term is these days) at Neo-Visuals. They were soon after acquired by SAS Institute, who moved the operation to North Carolina. I think one Neo-Visuals staff member made the move to the new location.
That summer I took a pause and spent some time reading. I met Alain Fournier, who was a well-respected professor of computer graphics at the University of Toronto. We chatted and he gave me a French PhD thesis to read. It was a thesis in botany about simulating the growth of plants. I have been interested in the procedural modeling of natural forms ever since.
While I would like to think that the progression of my career (and the turns in my life) have been the result of deliberate, thoughtful actions on my part, I have had to acknowledge that more often than not it has been by sheer happenstance.
And so it was that one summer morning I received a call from Montreal. On the line was Daniel Langlois, who had a new startup called Softimage. Mike Sweeney was working for him, developing a new rendering system, and had recommended me as a software developer.
Daniel and three other students at the University of Montreal — Pierre Lachapelle, Philippe Bergeron, Pierre Robidoux — had made a ground-breaking 1985 short film called “Tony de Peltrie” which had played at the Siggraph electronic Theater.
And so it was that my life pivoted eastward, and I hopped on the train to go interview at Softimage.
Design & Code
Some more particle-dynamics-and-extrusion tests. Looking kind of like an aloe plant, in keeping with the mention of procedural growth above.
There are three animators at work in this scene. The dynamics-animator does the simulation of the particles being influenced by the noise-force-field. Each particle is its own shape with its own transform, which is fine for testing but not optimal for large-scale use. But I’m more interested in rapid prototyping for now.
The make-pathmaker-animator function creates a generic animator with custom init and update functions. The animator creates a curve from the particle positions at each frame.
The third and final animator created by make-sweep-animator extrudes a profile curve along the path curves of the previous animator.
I will dive deeper into the workings of these animators in the next posting.
