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

Published by Ronny on December 20th, 2008 in Actionscript, General. 2 Comments Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

Generated Landscape

Kris Temmerman. Don’t know that name yet? Well you should. Let me show you why.
Allright, take a look at the following picture.

Looks like an ordinary 3D landscape, doesn’t it? Well it isn’t! In fact it’s the result of some smart math and a perlin noise bitmap. There is no 3D involved. No Papervision3D. No collada model. Just plain old 2D generated perlin noise. Ok, this might look pretty cool already. Kris took it one step further though… What if you generate this kind of landcape on the fly, and move it?

View the Flash version of the image: Click
Read all about it on Kris’ blog: Click

Flash game in 23 lines

Ok, this is kinda insane. Keith Peters brought back life to the 25 lines contest, as I posted earlier(Dutch). Only a few days ago the winners of November-December were announced. The winner – Marius Heil – made a platform game in ASCII using a custom copy-paste engine. That sounds like impossible to do in 25 lines. Marius however managed to to it in 23 lines. Come on, that’s insane. Congrats, Marius ;)
The code he used was a real kick in the teeth for probably every best practice rule out there, but the result is pretty amazing. I urge you to check this out.
Note: I love how you can cheat the game. Awesome!

Play SmileyBounce 25: Click
View the code: Click

Augmented reality

That’s sounds familiar… Makes me think of artificial intelligence or something… Right? No.
This is pretty freaking cool amazing. The people over at Boffswana have been playing with the same things that Mario Klingemann showed at <head>. In his presentation, Mario held up a paper with a square on it. Flash would show the webcame stream, look for that square on that paper and add a logo right onto it in the right perspective using a bit of Papervision3D.
That sounds cool to you? Check this out: The people over at Boffswanna added another dimension to this (literally), and made an actual (animated) 3D model appear on the screen. I could explain all this, but what the heck: Just check it out for yourself.
This definitely made it to a 9.5/10 on my ‘blow-my-mind-o-meter’.

View the demo: Click
Read everything on their site, and play with it yourself: Click

So that’s it. If none of this made your jaw drop to the floor, I’d love to see your portfolio and experiments right away. :-P

Feel free to link to other cool projects in the comments :)


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Mattijs @ 16:18 - December 26th, 2008

I like the augmented reality :) Car producer Mini is already using a similar technique in their new campaign:

http://www.adgabber.com/video/video/show?id=546804%3AVideo%3A139115

noCreativity.com » Blog Archive » I’ve said it for a long time, just didn’t quite make my point @ 12:45 - November 26th, 2009

[...] doing it too, just because Smashing Magazine prove the concept works. I myself have only published 1 single post like that in the 2 years I’ve been blogging. And hell: I’m proud of it! And the more I [...]

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