Summer time, no vacation

Hadn’t posted in a long while. I was swamped with school work – projects, exams, and more projects. But now it is all over, and I can finally take a breather. Although, it will be a short breather; I have to go to summer class to catch up with missed classes. *sigh* Oh well, at least it’s better than just staying at home.

So, for this summer, I have a few things in mind that I plan to accomplish, in no particular order:

• finish summer classes, obviously
• finish reading “Making Things Move”
• hopefully have some semblance of a website
• learn how to drive
• have fun

There might be a few more other things, but those are the ones on the top of my head right now. They all seem attainable in the limited time I have between classes.

I’ll be back with more Flash stuff, but maybe no more random experiments this time. I’m going back to basics reading the “Making Things Move” book (awesome read).

Metaballs update

Still delving into metaballs. I implemented the suggestions in this page for optimizing, and the results are good. I could even animate it – just barely though, at ~15 FPS on my browser.  Again, most of this is just copy & paste from the source provided in the tutorial.

Metaballs – move your mouse around.  Click to change the target ball.

Still looking for a more elegant solution for Flash. This is done on a very small stage size, with only 4 balls. I want to do a full screen version, with at least 10 balls moving around.

Simple Metaballs

I stumbled upon Metaballs yesterday, and decided it would be cool to try it out. I’ve seen some very nice examples done in Flash, but no luck finding their sources.

After Googling around, I found this tutorial on Metaballs and computer graphics.

I ported the code into AS3, but the result is not very impressive. It is very slow and processor heavy. If you click on the stage, the last Metaball added will be moved, and as you can see, it takes a bit of time to redraw them. I’m not even thinking about animating this.

I’m still looking for a more elegant solution for Flash, hopefully one that uses the Vector-based drawing API of Flash, and not BitmapData.

UPDATE: I have an updated version here. Also, I linked the image above to the updated one. For comparison, the old one is here.

The Happy New Year! post

Happy new year everyone!

Here is a neat little animation, made by 300,000 candles.

Happy new year!

RGB seperation test

After seeing a cool demo from the ClockMaker blog, I was inspired to try and recreate the effect. My attempt is not very impressive, but I did manage to figure out how he did it. Although much of this is from his sourcecode, I just thought I’d post a simplified version and put little comments and stuff.

And oh, Merry Christmas to all!

Click the image to see the movie.

Source.

Nice source-codes from 25-lines AS contest

I missed it by a few days, but the 25-Line ActionScript contest has just ended, and 12 finalists and their works have been put up. All of them are very impressive and cool. Check it out and vote for your favorite!
I especially liked these:
http://www.25lines.com/finalists/0812/073.swf
http://www.25lines.com/finalists/0812/043.swf
http://www.25lines.com/finalists/0812/037.swf
http://www.25lines.com/finalists/0812/034.swf

ActionSnippet – AS3 tips and tricks

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.