Killing Just to Save a few Bucks

Yesterday morning, Black Friday, as Wal-Mart employees tried to hold sliding doors back against a crowd of near 2,000, an employee was trampled. Multiple employees were holding the doors against the unruly crowd right before opening time, but the crowd burst through the doors, and in the process threw all of the employees back, and one to the floor. As the crowd ran by the employee struggling to breathe, other employees tried to get to him to help him. The man taken to the hospital, and died an hour after the crowd first came flying through the doors. Full Story

Is this what the American life has become? Groups of people willing to kill just to save some money on a Friday morning? What must other countries who already think we are unbelievably greedy be thinking of us now? I hope people realize that a person's life is priceless, and that destroying one to get a better price on something is an unbalanced, heartless decision. My heart and prayers go out to the family of this Wal-Mart employee. Bless them Lord.

Glow!

Glowing stuff seems to look nice most of the time. Therefore, it is nice to be able to make some. I just made some simple glowing spheres, and put them in a dynamic simulation so I did not have to worry about positioning them myself. The only thing I had really trouble with in this scene was parenting a lights to each of the dynamically translated objects. But thanks to the varomix on the SideFX forums, I was able to solve my problem. So I was able to create a decent quick animation, and a higher quality frame from it with global illumination.

Animation: http://vimeo.com/2133774

Frame: http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3000358717/