I’ve bookmarked this site. You should too! There are some very useful and helpful tips in there. Like the latest one, as of this writing, about simplifying multiple method calls to a graphic (or any) object.

From this:

mc.graphics.lineStyle(0);
mc.graphics.moveTo(10, 10);
mc.graphics.lineTo(20,10);
//...

To this:

with (mc.graphics) {
    lineStyle(0);
    moveTo(10, 10);
    lineTo(20,10);
    //...
}

Much more readable and easier to type.

Check it out here and bookmark it.

I happened on this site today. It is a ” fan-curated gallery” of all of Pixar’s publicly available conecpt artwork. It’s not very extensive right now, but it still is a great source of inspiration.

The Art of Pixar

I found this little class that displays the framerate of the current movie and the total memory usage of the Flash Player on your movie. It also shows the version of the player and the operating system you are on. It even has a graph. Very useful for monitoring your experiments or whatever. 

Link.

If anyone knows something better, please let me know. 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Got caught up with exams and projects for school, and a lot of DotA with friends. Now sem-break is here, I  can now just sit around and be bored.

I’ve been playing around with Papervsion lately, and have finally understood how to make it work, albeit only lightly. Here is one of my first attempts with Papervision. It’s just a bunch of spheres, where clicking on one will move the camera to its position, while the camera focuses on the center.

It’s not much. I’m still working on it, but I just wanted to post something here. Check it out. Flash Player 10 is required.

Update: I’ve added a depth of field effect. It’s not very “accurate”, but it’s a nice touch. I don’t know how to do it efficiently, so it might be CPU intensive.

Update 2: I’ve added random movement to the particles.

As always, the source.

I’ve decided to give Illustrator a second chance since I’ve found that the Flash drawing environment was just not cutting it for me. I tried Inkscape, but it just didn’t feel right. I’ve always steered clear of Illustrator before because I hated how complicated it was compared to Flash, but it appears I am forced to just suck it in.

After a few hours of searching, I found this nice introductory tutorial. I think the “30 days” thing is just a gimmick, but, I do need to learn it in 5 days if I am to finish a project I’m working on. And since I’m familiar on how vector graphics work, and all I really need to do is adjust and learn the more advanced stuff, 5 days seems plausible.

I’ve also gathered some nice links regarding Illustrator/vector stuff.

Vectips

AIburn

VectorTuts

And the most awesome site I’ve found so far: GoMediaZine

Greetings all, still haven’t fixed the PC, and no plans in buying a new one. But, being forced to use a Macbook with no games installed(damn DotA) and a slow connection, I managed to find some time to get back into Flash and ActionScript.

I finally figured out how to setup external class libraries in FlexBuilder, which took longer than I would have hoped. Now I can use Papervision3D, Away3D and have a central library for all other API’s and classes.  It’s not as enjoyable as FlashDevelop, but, it’s better than nothing.

I also started playing with PV3D, which is just awesome. Very fun to play around with, and I can’t wait to make something I could use for my eternally work-in-progress site.

And finally, there’s a new tweening engine on the block. It’s called gTween and it’s made by Grant Skinner, so you know it’s great. Like TweenLite, it aims for speed and it’s also very lightweight. It’s still in beta, and not as powerful and feature-packed as TweenMax or other tweening engines. I haven’t tested it enough to choose it over TweenLite yet, but, I like it’s different approach to creating and managing (yep, you could manage, edit, reuse and even nest) tweens. Check it out here.

And, yeah, I would post my little “experiment” with Papervision, but I can’t seem to extract/find the swf file. I even tried using the .as file as a Document class to a Flash file, but I still can’t double-click and play the movie.

I am also having trouble with FlexBuilder, whenever I Run/Play button to test a project, it often doesn’t show anything until several retries or not at all, but using the .as file as a Doc class to a Flash file, it plays fine. Any help would be very much appreciated.

My PC died earlier this week. It took with it all my files and experiments, but no worries, I have uploaded some of them here and I already learned from all of them. I also don’t have the latest files for my website now (which is getting cold), so I guess I should just start a new one. But, the worst part is, I only have a Mac to work on now, which doesn’t have FlashDevelop . I either have to try to work on FlexBuilder or just be idle for a few days (or weeks!) until I fix my PC or maybe get a new one *sigh*.