More particle awesomeness

A few weeks ago, I toyed around with particles. I used perlin noise maps to send the particles in the right directions. However the particles were randomly positioned and just a boring flat color… Kris Temmerman addressed that in his latest experiment. As he’s a decent man, he’s always sharing his code, so I just took his render engine, threw in some AIR magic and got myself a PNG sequence generator (for those who don’t speak Ronny: I made an AIR app that generates these image particles explosions and in the meantime saves every step as a PNG file. That way you can create a video based on these frames )

As it turns out I happen to have no life at all, so I went for insanity when I decided trying to get enough images for a 60 seconds sequence (Generating those images took a whole afternoon… I ended up having ±15GB of HQ PNG files).

Anyway, long story short: I’ve got this video I wanted to show you.

You know: Afterwards I realized this could probably be done using After Effects right away… (I wouldn’t know to be honest). But in the end, it’s proven again: Sometimes not knowing how crazy something is, is actually a good thing.

PS: I would share the AIR app, but right now it’s buggy as hell and somehow memory seems to be an issue. Will need to address those first. I promise I will release it sometime soon

Jarvis, are you there? At your service, sir.

Did you see the first Iron Man movie? Well you should have. It’s freaking great! But I’m not going to make this a write-up about that movie. I do hope you did see the trailer for the second one? If you haven’t: enlighten yourself!

But this isn’t about the next movie… Well, not directly. Marvel put up a pretty cool interactive demo of the Jarvis HUD and the Iron Man mask, in order to give you a taste of the second part of awesomeness! If you like geeky Flash stuff, you just HAVE to check this one out.

Note: Loading, installing (it requires an additional plugin) and configuration is pretty slow (and kinda buggy) but it’s really worth the effort. It’s very reactive and it just looks great! It’s a great example of augmented reality and using cool graphics. I love it! Go and check it out!

Painting done the hard way

“Wow!” was all I could say when I saw this!

This is a little documentary about Dave Lefner. He’s a artist, located in Los Angeles. He ‘paints’ using something called linoleum block prints. I have never heard of it before, but when I saw how it’s done and how amazingly cool the results looked, I wondered why nobody ever told me about this? The whole process looks so amazingly great!

On top of that: I love the video editing and quality! The footage looks so amazingly great! The colors, the shots, the image quality. It looks like the pixels were hand drawn onto the screen by an angel!
In all seriousness: What kind of videocamera does it take to capture such footage? If you do know: Please let me know!

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