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.

The Art of Pixar

Link.

If anyone knows something better, please let me know. 

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.

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

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.

I recently got an invite from someone at the kirupa.com forums to some Aviary tools. I only have access to two tools at the moment (Phoenix and Peacock), and only tested Phoenix (Peacock was a bit too complicated to test).

All I’ve got to say is, wow. This toolset is quite impressive. It has some very nice basic features, a few filter effects, hotkeys (!), and it is very smooth (it’s slow at times, but that’s because of my limited CPU). The interface is very nice, although the icons and panels are a little too big and take a lot of real estate IMO.

Still, it’s a little buggy, and there a Feedback menu on the toolbar for easy, well, feedback. I’m going to play more with Phoenix and try to make something cool. I really want to test Hummingbird (the 3D editor), but I don’t know how to sign up for the beta or even if it’s available.

I have a few invites remaining, so if you want to try them, just post.

Click on the image below to see the effect.

What’s happening is, I get the size of the image, divide it by the size of the “pixels” I want, then create an array of Rectangles positioned in a grid over the image.
I then fill each Rectangle with the color of the pixel in it’s center by using the getPixel() and fillRect() methods of the BitmapData class.
Here is the central function doing the pixelating.

private function pixelate(bitmap:Bitmap, strength:Number):void {
var _x:int = 0; // position of the rectangle
var _y:int = 0;
if (strength > 1){
_strength = 1;
}
var _strength:Number = strength; // multiplier for size of "pixels"

var _w:Number = bitmap.bitmapData.width * _strength; //size of "pixels"
var _h:Number = bitmap.bitmapData.height * _strength;

var nH:int = Math.ceil(bitmap.bitmapData.width / _w); // number of rectangles needed horizontally
var nV:int = Math.ceil(bitmap.bitmapData.height / _h);// number of rectangles needed vertically

var rectangles:Array = []; // Rectangles array

//create rectangles
for (var i:int = 0; i < nV; i ++){
var targH:Number = _h;
if (i >= nV - 1){
targH = bitmap.bitmapData.height - _y;
}
for (var j:int = 0; j < nH; j ++){
var targW:Number = _w;
if (j >= nH - 1){
targW = bitmap.bitmapData.width - _x;
}
rectangles.push(new Rectangle(_x, _y, targW, targH));
_x += _w;
}
_x = 0;
_y += _h;

}
//fill in rectangles
for (i = 0; i < rectangles.length; i++){

var rect:Rectangle = rectangles[i];
var pix:uint = _states[0].getPixel((rect.x + rect.width / 2), (rect.y + rect.height / 2));
bitmap.bitmapData.fillRect(rect, pix);
}

saveCurrentState(bitmap.bitmapData);

}

Now for the reverting to the original image part, I had to improvise. Since I overwrote the BitmapData with a bunch of filled rectangles, I couldn’t do much with it.
So I used an array which stores each “state” the BitmapData is in. And I could just retrieve the BitmapData in the array and copy it into the original BitmapData.

private function saveCurrentState(bitmapData:BitmapData):void {
_states.push(bitmapData.clone());
}
private function revertToState(stage:int):void {
try{
bmData.copyPixels(_states[stage], bmData.rect, new Point(bmData.rect.x, bmData.rect.y));
}catch (e:Error){
throw new Error("Invalid state. ");
}
}

To create the animation, I just called the pixelate() function through a Timer at 300 milliseconds.

http://gskinner.com/talks/as3workshop/