Some Drawing Fun and a Bad Movie You’ll Never See

by Devon O.· April 04, 2010· in Flash· 2 comments tags: after effects, video
Earlier today, Dave Gillem posted a link on Facebook to an incredible Processing based drawing application. Thought I’d have a go at reproducing something similar in Flash. Well, I failed miserably, but the results were still interesting enough to check out. You can play around with it below. Just mouse down to draw in the black area. All in all (when you add in the wife’s chili), I’d say it was an Easter Sunday well spent. And, for something completely different… Q: What do you get when you splice together about 20 all right movie trailers and throw in a bit of Prodigy and Psychic TV? A: One really great movie trailer… Originally I intended to use this for one of those “upload your face and personalise” apps. I got it working but, honestly, it looked like shite (that’s the type of thing you really need to shoot custom video for). I was much happier with just the unpersonalised spliced up video which you can have fun watching below. And if anyone can actually name every movie I spliced together to make this thing, I’ll.. Well, I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’ll come up with some sorta prize. […]
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More With the JiglibFlash Terrain

by Devon O.· March 17, 2010· in Flash· 0 comments tags: jiglib, jiglibflash, terrain
Playing around a bit more with the animated JiglibFlash terrain idea from my last post, I wanted to see how it would work in conjunction with a webcam. So, needless to say, you’ll need a webcam to check out the results below. The trouble, I’ve found, is that when you create the JTerrain instance, you specify the number of horizontal and vertical segments to create (similar to instantiating a simple Plane object in Papervision3D). Unfortunately, my experience is that if you go over about 12 or 13 segments, the application begins to chew through memory like skittles. So, stuck with using only 12 horizontal/vertical segments, the results are fairly abstract (with 50 or more, you can see a clear definition of your face but, again, you can’t run it very long before it freezes up and eventually crashes). Still, even in an abstract way, the finished product is pretty cool and kind of spooky. With a little luck, the JiglibFlash guys will run across these posts and implement this animation feature in a more optimized way rather than my half assed hack job. We’ll see. Still working on a jiglib ragdoll idea…
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Rockin and Rollin with the JiglibFlash Terrain

by Devon O.· March 16, 2010· in Actionscript, Flash· 8 comments tags: jiglibflash, physics, terrain
Finally got the chance to play around with the new JiglibFlash height map terrain, today, and have to say I am very impressed! The first thing I noticed missing, though, was the ability to update the terrain in order to use animated height maps. I tried deleting then creating a new terrain inside a rendering event handler. This actually worked better than it sounds like it might. At least for a very short time. Going this route, within less than a minute, the frame rate dropped from around 58 to around 15 and the memory usage was well over 400 and climbing steadily to an inevitable crash. I knew an update function was needed for any animation. Before I dig into the nerd stuff, have a look at what I’m talking about. Double click the example below to see an animated JTerrain instance in action (double click on it a second time to stop the animation and save a bit of processor power). And this is just using perlin noise. You could also use sound data (mp3 or microphone), video data, etc. etc (giving myself some ideas and goosebumps just thinking about it). If you’d like to try this out […]
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FITC in Quick Review

by Devon O.· February 24, 2010· in Flash, Life· 0 comments tags: FITC
Well another FITC Amsterdam has come and gone and left its indelible mark of energy and inspiration. Thought I’d share a bit of what went on, however I’m writing this from a teensy laptop that came with the flat I’m staying in. It was a much appreciated gesture, but is not very conducive to typing, so this will probably be shorter and less detailed than intended. Besides I’m in Amsterdam another 3 days and got stuff to do… Day 1 Started the day with the Adobe Keynote presentation given by Richard Galvan and Mark Anders. This had its good and bad points. Nothing really new was presented here – it was all the stuff we’ve seen blogged from AdobeMax and MWC. Still it was interesting to see some of this in action: how Flash performs on Android devices for example or how Device Central CS5 will allow you to test the accelerometer of mobile devices (that is a great feature. My hat’s off to Adobe for that one). Very exciting stuff in the world of mobile development. Next up for me was James Eberhardt’s presentation on Building iPhone Apps in Flash CS5. Unfortunately, I came in late to a standing room only auditorium […]
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More Augmented Reality with HTML5 && Flash

by Devon O.· February 10, 2010· in Flash· 0 comments tags: augmented reality, html5
Okay, so my last post was really a bit of a joke. I was just seeing how many of the trendiest tech buzzwords I could get running on a single page, and admittedly, it performed horribly. I did learn something in the process though. If I left the html5 canvas link out of that chain, the Flash / Unity communication was actually quite smooth and ran nicely. Likewise, if I cut out the Unity business, the Flash / HTML communication was grand. So, for my next experiment, I decided to leave out the Unity and do some Flash and HTML5 augmented reality. The results are actually pretty impressive. You can check it out for yourself here or just have a look at the screenshot below. A big thanks to Thatcher Ulrich who provided 99.9% of the “3d image in a canvas element” javascript. And it just goes to show – Flash and HTML5 can play together just fine…
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Devon O. Wolfgang

AIR | Unity3D | AR/VR

Unity Certified Developer

Technical Reviewer of “The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development” and “Starling Game Development Essentials”

Reviewer of “The Starling Handbook”

Unity Engineer at Touch Press.

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