DINO VIDEO CDs

[steve.cole@genie.com]

I was catching up on Dinosaur Digest files from April and noticed
a lot of discussion about getting ILM or someone to do a CD rom
disk of dinosaurs running and jumping and stuff. The consensus
seems to have been that it would take a whole lot of time
and no one was likely to do it.

An artist friend of mine is doing (for Dinosaur Discoveries)
a computer-generated "sequence" of four images showing a T-Rex
at full gallop tripping and falling on his face. (This is to
illustrate an article on the theory.) This artist, who has
mainly done other work for our company in the past, found out
about Dinosaur Discoveries and offered to do this sequence.
Seems he bought a canned package of dinosaur stuff for his
computer, including six or ten different dinos. He can, by
entering keyboard commands, "pose" these animals any way
he wants (running, rearing up, bitting down). The four images
he's sending over for the magazine are actually four frames
out of a video sequence that the computer generated. The whole
process took him two hours (to generate 15 seconds of video)
and half of that was him on the phone to me discussing
what it was I really wanted.

Now, his computers are professional graphic/animation things,
not the typical 4/586 or Mac-II systems we all use.
He's got about 10 times the 20mb/ram I have, and his
syquest removable disks store multiple gigabyte images with ease.
But his stuff looks pretty good, and if he can buy it
as basically video clip art for a couple of hundred bucks,
a computer-generated version of Raptor Red might take only
a couple of months.

I don't have a lot of details of how he's doing this (and
don't understand what I remember) but if anyone out there is
really into this I'll give you his address.--SVC