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                                  p r e s e n t s 

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        r e m e m b r a n c e  -  t h e  d o l p h i n ' s  d r e a m

                  .  .  b r e a k p o i n t  2 0 0 6  .  .

                   code, design, music & animation - jaw
                       
                        made with Vovoid VSX Ultra

                      visit us at http://vovoid.com

              download VSX ultra (VSXu) at http://vsxu.com

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  system requirements
                        
    + graphics card with OpenGL2.0 support 
    + recent CPU, water FFT is heavy on FPU calculations
      for instance, runs fine on an AMD X2 4400 with 400Mhz 
      dual channel memory but drops frames on a P4 3Ghz with 
      333Mhz memory

    + tested on the following systems: 
      + Geforce 7800 GTX + AMD Athlon X2 4400+ (full framerate)
      + ATI Radeon 1600XTX + AMD Athlon X2 4400+ (full framerate)
      + ATI Radeon X700 + Intel XEON 1Ghz (runs at about 10-20fps)
      

  production notes by jaw
                              
    "what if i would fly... could i touch the sky?"
    
    The idea for this demo ignited one evening in august 2005, when a friend
    spoke in very enthusiastic words about a dolphin show she had seen 
    multiple times.
    
    For a while I had the wish to integrate skeletal animation into VSXu and 
    my first thought at this moment was: "let's do something with a jumping 
    dolphin". I figured dolphins had little gravity and few bones impacting 
    them as opposed to a human where you have to deal with gravity deforming 
    the back and such. Also, more bones in a human. Of course i was mistaken
    about it being easy, the thing i didn't think about was that water makes 
    the dolphin's fins move, and also water friction slowing down the body.
    
    I'm not sure these efforts are obvious in the demo, but it looked horrible
    when i started animating :) This made animation take 3 times more than i 
    had expected, and i was ready to give up on this project multiple times on
    the way due to the difficulties of 'getting it right', and there's still 
    lots that could be improved.
    
    To animate the dolphin this demo uses spherical linear interpolation of 
    quaternions directly controlling the animation library's quaterions for
    each bone. Thus i could control the cal3d library which is used for the
    character animation. (http://cal3d.sourceforge.net)

    I prefer to animate inside VSXu to be able to test and fine-tune the 
    synchronization with the music, something i would find difficult to do 
    if having to re-import everything from the 3d software every time, and 
    even slower if i had to work with someone else (3d animator).  Some of
    you might think that using and modifying an opensource library such as
    cal3d is lame - and yes, from a demoscene perspective I strongly agree. 
    However VSXu is more than just a demotool. In the light of making stuff 
    possible for others to use on a larger scale than just for demos (VJ's 
    and other artists), the choice of cal3d is obvious.´
        

  3rd party stuff used

    + original dolphin model in OBJ format released free for non-commercial
      use, optimized/skinned/rigged by me in blender
    + ocean storm sample (SFX)
    + some samples from the freesample project

       

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