So I just got my grubby little paws on Keith Peters’ latest book, “Advanced Actionscript 3.0 Animation”. I couldn’t even get past chapter 2 before I had to try out some stuff on my own. Chapter 2 is all about steering behaviours for AI animated movement. If you’re not familiar with the concept of steering behaviours, [...]
Just playing around with a little twisty cube idea that’s been percolating in the back o’ me noggin for a bit…
Well here’s one more take. Now there’s two levels – you’ll bounce back and forth between them as you get through each maze. I made everything a bit smaller which improves cpu usage and also makes it easier to see. Also (hopefully) fixed it so that it will be viewable on Macs (Don’t know why [...]
Finally had a bit of time to play some more with this combination of the jiglibflash physics engine and augmented reality and thought it was time to post. Use this marker to check out the example below. You can work the ball through the maze by actually tilting the marker paper around. It can be [...]
So I was playing around with the JiglibFlash Physics engine in augmented reality the other day and thought to myself, “Self, wouldn’t it be just the bees knees if you could actually control the movements of your little 3D world items by just moving around the Augmented Reality marker paper thing you’re holding in your [...]
Well, I figured it was high time to jump on board the augmented reality train. All the examples I’ve seen have just been amazing and I had to find out for myself just how difficult it was. Turns out, it’s remarkably simple. For the subject matter, I turned to the recently deceased J. G. Ballard. [...]
So, my wife is working on an installation piece for a local gallery and got me digging into the concept of Flash web cam motion detection. I really liked the looks of the motion detection script posted over at the Soulwire blog and started tinkering with it. The early results are posted below. Of course [...]
Started out the day with Andre Michelle’s “Boing-Bumm-Tschak (Flash 10 Sound API)” presentation. Very beautiful stuff. The biggest thing learned here is that manipulating sound is not so different from manipulating graphic items. That is, reverb is nothing more than a basic “easeout” formula and flanging is just elasticity applied to sound. Some useful tips he [...]
Just got back to the great loft apartment I’m staying at in Amsterdam and thought I’d jot down some impressions thoughts and notes of Day One of the sold out FITC conference while they’re still fresh in me little noggin. First up was the Keynote opening featuring Serge Jespers, Lee Brimelow, Mike Chambers, and Paul [...]
So, the other day I needed to add a background color to a TextField in Flash. I don’t mean a rectangular area of color such as the backgroundColor property of a TextField would produce, but irregularly sized rectangles that varied by the width of each line of text in the dynamic TextField. Basically, I needed [...]
Many moons ago I posted an AIR tool that would allow a user to drag a .swf file into a target area and have it spit out all the javascript, html, etc into a designated output directory. I’m not sure if anyone other than I ever used the thing, but I actually use it constantly [...]
I’ve seen ‘em used in After Effects for ages and now they’re a part of the Flash CS4 interface, so I figured why not a new Flash widget. This little UI component allows users to change numerical values by clicking then dragging their mouse to the left and right over the number display. By clicking [...]
So much going on all at once as this year draws to a close… The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development is now in stock at Amazon! I worked as Technical Reviewer on this thing and can say in all honesty, this is a very good book from Marco Casario, et al. For those [...]
Just in for the holidays – a new LightBox JS implementation for Flash (with a Flash 10 3d Twist). Here’s a quickie example made with Flex just to see what I’m on about. The main drawback seems to be the new Flash Player 10 3d features tend to blur the edges of the picture’s frame. Not [...]
Turn your boring old photographs into boring old polaroids with the amazing new Polarizer! Click on the camera to browse for an image file (.jpg) to upload. Ideally the image should be 516px. by 516px. Square images will look the best – otherwise, expect some distortion (in other words, all photos will be set to [...]
Since the release of Flash 10, I’ve seen a few blog posts about creating .swc libraries that can be used in Flash. Probably the most in depth was Mike Chambers article “Creating Re-distributable Actionscript Libraries of Pixel Bender Filters”. Needless to say, I had to give it a go, myself. So, I fired up Pixel [...]
