Bezier animation fun revisited

A few months ago I experimented with Bezier Animation and allthough I uploaded my SWF files and shared them, I never really shared the source. This is what I wanted to do a few days ago when I thought “Oh, what the hell… Let’s clean that code up before uploading it…”.

So I started moving some code around and after a few minutes, I found myself rewriting the whole thing… That’s not a bad thing since now we’ve got one handy class that can do about just everything a Bezier Animator should be able to do.
Demo time!

There’s still a little bug somewhere which allows the target to ‘run away’ from the bezier, and I haven’t gotten quite to the root of the problem, but I really felt I had to share this. Also there are some imperfections when you disable the orientToPath and scaleByPath properties. I will look into fixing those asap.

I really love the idea of animation movieclips using bezier curves. It looks so natural and yet zo intriguing… I will do some experiments and upload them later on, showing the coolness behind this simple animation engine.

Sources
Download the above demo source (Flash Builder 4 project): Click
Download the BezierAnimatioin class: Click

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