noCreativity.com » PNG http://nocreativity.com The life and discoveries of a new media artist Sat, 07 Jan 2012 17:03:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 More particle awesomeness http://nocreativity.com/blog/more-particle-awesomeness http://nocreativity.com/blog/more-particle-awesomeness#comments Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:13:40 +0000 Ronny http://nocreativity.com/blog/?p=1059 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 ;-)

]]> http://nocreativity.com/blog/more-particle-awesomeness/feed 3 World360 update, now with PNG bug! http://nocreativity.com/blog/world360-update-now-with-png-bug http://nocreativity.com/blog/world360-update-now-with-png-bug#comments Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:17:01 +0000 Ronny http://nocreativity.com/blog/?p=383 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

Result without redrawing bitmap (aka: real time rendering)

Result when redrawing the bitmap

Result when redrawing the bitmap (aka pre-rendering)

I have no clue what is going on… I have been looking into this issue all day, to no avail… If anyone knows what is going on, feel free to enlighten me.

The PNG file is fine, it’s not corrupt or badly exported, since it works just fine in different versions of the render engine. I do however wonder if redrawing a bitmap over and over again doesn’t create some kind of noise.

If you feel like giving it a shot you can download the .as file here, or get the complete Flash project (.fla + .as + assets) here. (The code is quite messy… Just so you know ;-) )
If anyone can point me into the right direction, your help would be much appreciated (and you shall be remembered forever)!

To illustrate the difference I uploaded 2 more versions.
Check out the previous version here (longer render time, but no PNG problem).
See the latest version here (using the faster implementation, generating very ugly black borders).

Edit: You can download the sources for V9 and V10 here to see the difference of the result.

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