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

World360 update, now with PNG bug!

Yesterday I decided to get back to my so called ‘World360′ experiment. I wanted to speed up the pre-rendering engine. I managed to do that, with some amazing results: Up to 3 times faster overall. Peaks of 800% speed gain!

You can view the previous version here.
The latest version can be viewed here.

I’m very happy with that, but there’s one little problem. I started to notice a very ugly black border around redrawn PNG transparency (which happens when the animation is pre-renderd).

Result without redrawing bitmap (aka: real time rendering)

Result when redrawing the bitmap (aka pre-rendering)

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