Bezier animation fun!

Last week I went to FITC in Amsterdam. It was great! I had such a great time. I met a lot of intresting people and although Amsterdam turned out to be quite expensive place, I really liked being there a few days.

During the conference I attended Joshua Davis‘ session which really inspired me. I’ve never seen Joshua Davis present, nor did I know his work. Let me be as crystal clear about this as I can be: The man is a freakin’ genius!
During his session he showed a few demo’s of bezier animated stuff. I felt like trying that myself, and this is what I came up with.

The basic concept is to create a bezier in Actionscript and animating movieclips using the bezier as its motion path.

• Basic principle (this is actually just a basic pentool (without the option of adding new points ))

The following versions use the same concept as this one, except instead of fixed anchor points, they all use random points defined in 2 planes. This makes a bit of variety possible allthough the main animation stays the same and that’s absolutely cool!

• Animation fun
• Animation fun V2

I added a few keyboard controls to give you some control of what is happening

• spacebar = show the handles
• r = clear the bitmap
• p = pause the animation
• n = randomize handles
• b = blur more

Webcam motion detection coolness

A few weeks ago I had to create an innovative way to scroll in a page. I have seen tons of scrollbars in Flash and I found it hard to create something completely new. At one point I wondered if I could wire the scrollbar to a webcam using Actionscript… So I started experimenting around…

When I first started I quickly ran into a problem: How the hell do I know if anything is moving? So I actually got stuck right in the beginning.
I went on a Google trip which led me to Koen’s post about motion detection. Koen was checking all the pixels (using nested loops) to calculate color values. I figured this generated way too much overhead. There had to be a better/simpeler way.

In his post Koen mentioned an article, written by Guy Watson, concerning an other way to get motion detection going. To make things simple: Guy just takes 2 pictures – one of the previous frame, one of the current – puts them on top of eachother, and applies the difference blend mode to the upper one: Tadaaa! There we go! The ‘unchanged’ pixels are blacked out. The remaining pixels are the difference in the picture… which reflects movement. Read the rest of this entry »

Visualizr source

A few people asked me for the Visualizr source. I always said I’d post it on my blog ‘pretty soon’… Well… It’s not pretty soon, but at least I didn’t totally forget about it. Anyway here’s the Actionscript class I made in a Flex Actionscript project

I did some pretty naughty things in there, but it worked out the way I wanted it… So be nice :p
Make sure you have got the MP3 tracks in place You’ll need at least one. Make sure you change the tracknames too.

The ‘this-is-so-cool-that-I-just-had-to-share-this-with-you’-post

Or short for ‘4 Flash experiments you must have seen‘.

Normally I’m completely against all those posts listing a bunch of items that somehow relate to each other in some way, but I’ve seen a few pretty amazing things lately that I just had to share with you.

Fun with Fur

Andre Michelle posted an experiment of his a couple of weeks ago about generating fur in Flash. The results look pretty amazing. Looks like the pictures came right out of Photoshop. However he didn’t post his SWF, nor his code. So there’s no way I could use the effect on my own images. Mark Knol however did post his SWF. In fact he built a fur generator that will enable you to link to your own picture, choose the correct settings for the engine to customize the furriness to your liking and then let it render your furry picture (which you can download afterwards). Isn’t that cool? Make sure to check both of them out.

Andre Michelle’s blogpost: Click
Andre Michelle’s Flickr Fur Collection: Click
Mark Knol’s fur engine: Click
Mark Knol’s blogpost: Click
Mark Knol’s Flick Fur pictures: Click

Read the rest of this entry »

Some more bitmapdata and soundSpectrum progress

Today I found some time to mess around with bitmapdata and computeSpectrum again. I’ve been playing with this earlier, but didn’t quite get where I wanted to be. A few weeks ago I came up with a better way of rendering the soundTunnel. That resulted in some crazy cool shit, which I finished off today.

I won’t go into technical details here (yet). I just wanted you guys to see the result.

Demo

Click here
And just to make sure it is actually reacting to the sound, try the following links too

• Song 1: Click
• Song 2: Click
• Song 3: Click (default)
  
• Song 4: Click
• Song 5: Click

Controls

• F: Go full screen
• S: Freeze visualization
• Click: Change color (happens automatically too)

Read the rest of this entry »