I have always been fascinated by dragonflies (and hummingbirds). From 1993 til 1996 I had access to 3D SGI workstations at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California. There I learned the basics of 3D graphics animation and programming. In summer of 1996, I produced this animation of a dragonfly by using Alias Studio 4.5 on a Personal Iris workstation running IRIX 4.x . Now (2006) home computers are available which are many times more powerful than the SGI workstations of the 90's, and a lot cheaper. This type of animation could run as a realtime graphics application such as a video game. Nonetheless, at the time, what I did was fairly cutting edge, and I think is still fun to look at.
Recently I've been taking photos of real dragonflies, intending to use them as textures for a modernized version of this concept of a dragonfly hunting and catching his lunch. The green ball in the old animation would have been a gnat or mosquito or something, but I ran out of time, so lunch stayed as a green ball.
© 2007 Ken Lindsay