Vanessa's Smalltalk Balloon (1997)

This is my rendering of the Smalltalk Balloon. Unlike most other renditions, this picture was created using Smalltalk itself!

Inspired by the famous BYTE cover I modeled the island and the balloon in 3D Studio. This three dimensional model was rendered with the line drawing renderer I developed in my diploma thesis in 1997.

The Smalltalk renderer analytically calculates visible parts of the polygons in the scene. The resulting pieces are colored according to the light and written to a PostScript file. On top of these faces a line drawing is created by smoothly drawing contours with splines. Again, the line width is adjusted to reflect the lighting. The whole process from loading the model to writing the file took about one minute on a Pentium 90 with VisualWorks 2.5.

The bitmap image above was created with Ghostscript and Paint Shop Pro. If you wish a high quality printout you should download the PostScript file (65K zip compressed) or a PDF (100K).

This is a transparent version of the little GIF seen on my Smalltalk page for use with backgrounds other than white. Grab it and use it all over the web