zero point nine

A wavey liquid surface being hit by rocks.

For best performance, you’ll want to use the 9.0.60 version of Flash Player with a multi-core CPU. Press D to lower the level of detail if it’s killing your browser.

Other controls:

T cycles through different textures
B cycles through texture blend modes
W shows the 3D wireframe
+/- moves the camera in and out
Spacebar pauses the action, allowing you to rotate around the scene

Conceptually, here’s whats going on…

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m pleased to announce the first public release of Webcam Digital Video Recorder for Apollo, which lets you record webcam video to the local file system while simultaneously playing back video from the same file (timeshifting). Unlike its browser-bound predecessor, this Apollo port does not rely on system memory to store video, but instead uses the Apollo File API to asynchronously save and load video on the fly, and can also convert its video to Macromedia Flash Video (FLV) format.

Download (requires Apollo AIR runtime, webcam)

* Updated for compatibility with the Adobe AIR runtime 1.0, 4/9/2008 *

Read the rest of this entry »

Action shot at work- Ryan and Al :P

As I’ve been updating Flash Webcam DVR to Apollo, I came up with a kind-of amusing idea of overlaying alpha images from a webcam across the desktop area. The key was plugging in the right magic numbers into the ColorMatrixFilter class (See source code below). While running the program, click on the image to toggle filters.

Download (requires Apollo runtime, webcam)

- Source code for main class file
- All project files

Version: 0.9

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

A few improvements have been made enhancing visual quality as well as overall framerate under load, plus a few presentation and interface-related tweaks.

The main class file for the effect has been updated as well.

Thanks to Carlos Ulloa and Alexander Zadorozhny for their thoughts on the Papervision3D mailing list.

The venerable Flash effect of turning a page in a book done in 3D. I originally designed and programmed this effect in Actionscript 2 using a home-grown 3D class library at about the time Papervision was entering public beta. This implementation using Papervision3D and AS3 runs a few times faster.

Press ENTER to create new instances of the book. Press it several more times and watch your browser chug :).

Here’s the main class for the page turn effect. I used the code for the PV3D Plane class as a starting point (but, in hindsight, probably should have subclass’ed from it instead). To create the appearance of a rotation of the 3D object, the individual vertices are rotated around the Y axis by increasing amounts depending on their (original) position along the X axis.

Version: 0.9B – Last updated on 4/22/2007

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

An image fade/dissolve where the individual pixels move off the bitmap and disappear. Written a couple months ago to learn how to get around in AS3. Not to be confused with the built-in BitmapData.pixelDissolve method.

In the supplied AS3 class, the direction of the movement of pixels is ‘hard coded’ to go from right to left. (Here’s the full project, as well.) To move the pixels in the opposite direction or up and down, the bitmap is rotated 90, 180, or 270 degrees and the wrapper sprite is rotated equally in the opposite direction – which is possible to interpret as a kludge.

To-do: Change the method used to select pixels that are to be animated. The way it’s done now is inefficient. If you look at the code, you’ll see what I mean.

Some other possible to-do’s: Dissolve images in an arbitrary direction; allow pixels to trail beyond the current boundaries of the bitmap; allow for the changing of parameter variables’ values while the effect is in progress; support for transparency.

Eating away individual pixels of a bitmap similar to what’s done here, it seems to me, could be the basis for some fun retro gameplay mechanics for a Flash-based game, à la Lemmings or Worms.

Version: 0.9

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Some of the most satisfying graphical effects are simple in concept and execution. Programmatically creating a half tone-style image from a bitmap (as seen in the blog masthead) turns out to be one of them. I got this right essentially on my first try.

Here’s the class in Actionscript 3. It’s essentially one public method which takes in a bitmap and writes to a sprite. With a few optional parameters. See the source code comment block for the details. I believe it’s pretty well optimized, but would love to see any improvements made to it for speed.

To do: Add the ability to use overlapping colors. Apparently, the dot patterns for additional colors are supposed to be set at different angles from each other — which is less straight-forward, programmatically speaking, than simply setting the ‘screen angle’ to 45-degrees, as I’ve done here. Please post any good ideas or improvements to the code below.

Version: 0.9

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

I recently spent a couple weekends geeking out to make this. It’s pure Actionscript 3, which meant excessive amounts of code to draw the UI.

You’ll need a webcam to test this.

Big caveat: This eats up a _ton_ of memory, as the video is simply made up of hundreds of frames stored in an array of BitmapData. Bigger caveat: The save and load feature is only practical for very short video clips, and will otherwise bring down the browser (!). It stores megs of data to a local SharedObject, which surely constitutes a criminal abuse of what LSO’s are designed to do. Hah. Rational: When doing personal stuff, I’m only half-interested in questions of usability and stability (Did I just say that?! LOL.)

To-do, hopefully: Port to Apollo. (But first learn how to use Apollo, haha). Offload video data from memory to disk using the Apollo file I/O API (Thanks, Béla, for the idea).

To-do, ideally: Find a solution to compress video to memory/disk on the fly.

Version: 0.8