In keeping with the space theme from my previous post (and not wanted to leave Starfield entirely empty) here’s another papervision parametric 3D object/component : Asteroid. Similarly to Starfield, asteroid is textured with pragmatically generated texture, so no need to look for images, it has configurable surface deformation as well and it’s default form it can be simply created and placed in your 3D scene with this only line of code : scene.addChild(new Asteroid());
Some PV3D sessions at Flash on the Beach inspired me to play with Papervision3D again and I sort of went for the “space” theme. And there’s certainly no space without stars! Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been working for couple of weeks now on a large Flex 3 based project at the company I work for. It’s a multi-user publishing system for various flash based creative types, that aids and alleviates the whole creative from concept creation through approval cycles to deployment on various platforms.
In this project I had a page that contained a tab navigator with a custom editors inside of it. It all worked fine, before I needed to make sure the data on the page is saved before going onto another tab. To make this work I had to essentialy force tab navigator to cancel select child action after user click on the other tab and the data on the current weren’t saved.
One one side you have euphoria of what’s POSSIBLE and on the other side what is REALISTICALLY usable. An all important parameter is the width of the gap between these two sides. After some time spent playing with PV3D I reallised just how deep this gap is.
I found out, that unless you cheat ( a lot ) , there’s no way, you can do a 3D that’s even close to a todays CGI standard. Among other problems, there’s a very low limit to number of fully shaded (goraud/phong) triangles you can have in a 3D scene before you send you CPU usage soaring.
Notice that even quite big names pv3d based sites (Absolut, Canon, Sony) although using very very, simple geometry aren’t quite smooth on even most powerful PCs. Even on a quad core intel machines you can notice a reaction lag, that distorts the smooth interactivity experience. On a below average machines this kind of sites can quickly become unusable. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the sessions at Flash on the Beach got me interested into playing with particles. Seb Lee showed us an example of a using particles to explode a skeleton. You clicked on a skeleton and bones went flying. The only problem was, you had to manually break up the skeleton into a bunch of movie clips first and placed them into the skeleton timeline. That got me thinking… There must be a way for Flash to do this programmaticaly. So I spend some time (and caffeine) and wrote a class capable of doing just that…
Above demo loads the titles of the blog entries from durej.com , breaks them apart and uses them as a particles. You can also roll over with your mouse to trigger particle animation. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a highly subjective list of books I think every developer should read at least once. Some of them are worth reading couple of times, or from time to time coming back to re-read certain passages. The first 3 books do not mention Flash inside them even once. All five, however; do cover spectrum of Flash related topics. As this is a list of books flash developer should read, I do not go into areas of multimedia, there could be another list dedicated to just sound editing, just video editing, just to 3D etc.. Read the rest of this entry »
