Making of the virtual domino animations
Ernest Micklei (emicklei@philemonworks.com)
The challenge to making a real life domino toppling scene is all about keeping the upmost concentration when placing the stones one by one. As each stone is placed there is a potential risk that it will topple by mistake and initiate an unstoppable toppling process. Of course the reward is great and experiencing the event gives the particpants and audience a thrill. But most people, like me, never got the chance to join or startup such an event. Most likely, this is because I couldn't find other people crazy enough to spend many hours sitting in a big room placing those millions of colored dominos. So I was never able to realize my imaginary scenes, until now... In November 1999, I started to create classes to model the process of toppling domino stones queued in a row. Working my way through complex trigonometric relations, I managed to generate a sequence of toppling angles for each domino such that the whole process could be animated. Using SmallScript3D, a 3D-language on top of Smalltalk, it became possible to generate domino animations using VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language). Now, all I have to do is put a lot of characters in rows, turns, circles, and bridges and my objects will take care of the rest. My talk will highlight the design and implementation of several classes needed to make all of this work for me. The domino text format, the scene reading phase, the angle computation process and some exporting issues will all be addressed. Curious people are invited to peek at http://www.philemonworks.com/domino/uk/index.html and see some examples.
http://www.esug.org/data/ESUG2000/Slides/virtualDominos/virtualDominos.html