[Sheflug] Linux at the Movies - Thanks!

["Robin Rowe" <rower [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gabrielle and I had a great time in Sheffield and enjoyed meeting everyone.
Special thanks to Richard Ibbotson, Mike Diprose, Bob Holland, and Tim
Mulroy for bringing us to Sheffield to speak to your group and for taking
such good care of us there!

To answer Lesley Anne Binks' question, I presented using my Mac laptop
instead of my Linux laptop for several reasons. The most significant being
my Linux laptop is a big 15-inch machine that weighs twice as much! I didn't
want to carry it from Los Angeles across Europe. Another issue is that my
Mac has Keynote -- very nice slide presentation software. There's nothing
comparable to Keynote or PowerPoint on Linux. When giving slide
presentations in Linux I use flPhoto or CinePaint, but export my slides as
images after creating them in PowerPoint. The experimental slideshow feature
in CinePaint will be available in the 0.19 release later this month, but
won't be very useful until CinePaint supports vector paint (maybe mid-2005).

Regarding the arrows in THE LAST SAMURAI, the close-up arrows were cloned
from images and painted in using CinePaint. The clouds of arrows were
modeled in a 3D package. A challenge there was that the troops had practical
arrows (physical props) attached to themselves when the scene was filmed.
Those had to be painted out and the 3D arrows programmed to impact in the
same spot as each practical arrow so that the actors could fall to the
ground with practical arrows sticking in them.

Regarding water modeling, what used to be the realm of studio programmers
has evolved to the point that there are good commercial water modeling tools
such as RealFlow (runs on Linux).

http://www.nextlimit.com/realflow/index.html

For those interested in experimenting with water modeling, Next Limit offers
a free evaluation copy of RealFlow.

Cheers,

Robin
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Robin.Rowe [at] MovieEditor.com   Beverly Hills, California
www.LinuxMovies.org - Advancing Linux motion picture technology

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