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Speaking

Blowing things up in Toronto

[kml_flashembed movie=”/wp-content/uploads/manual/2007/introweb.swf” width=”445″ height=”340″ FVERSION=”9″ QUALITY=”high” /] Having a fantastic time here in Toronto, although in a supreme display of poor planning my session is at 9am this morning! Never fear! We shall fight the hangovers from the awesome party last night (thanks Influxis) and produce more crazy particle effects! As ever, bring your laptop […]

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Speaking

Next stop : Toronto FITC

Right at the last minute, Shawn’s invited me to speak at FITC Toronto! And not only that, but we’ve been nominated for a coveted FITC award! So it’d be great if you could vote for us. We’re in the self-promotional section for our Plug-in Media website. Pretty please 🙂 AND! Not only that! I’ve got […]

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Speaking

Arduino workshop at FlashCoders New York on Wednesday

I’m flying with fellow Plug-in Media colleagues Juliet and Sarah to New York on Tuesday to meet with clients that I’m not sure I’m allowed to talk about… but we’re producing some cool Flash 3D for a massive US sports company… seriously exciting work so watch this space for more details. And I’m taking the […]

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General

Arduino particles!

My good friend and FlashBrighton veteran Jo Summers has been enthusing at me for some time about the Arduino boards. And I just knew that as soon as I started playing with one, I would get obsessed, so I’ve been putting it off for a while. I knew you could use Arduinos to interface with […]

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General

Papervision Perspective Line material

Good news! I’ve integrated my new 3D line drawing algorithm into a Papervision LineMaterial class! Bad news! It probably won’t work for very long… the reason? Well Papervision is going through an exciting transformation that I’m not sure I can talk about right now… but suffice it to say, it’ll be pretty cool. But in […]

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General

Drawing 3D perspective lines in Flash

I love the Line3D in papervision, but wouldn’t it be great if it actually got larger as it came towards you? Currently the lines are just drawn using the Flash drawing API, and the line’s thickness is the same no matter how far away it is. I’ve been working on a new line drawing algorithm. […]

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Speaking

Particle tutorial now on Lynda.com

After the Computer Arts article last month, you can now see my full particle presentation over on lynda.com [sorry, no longer available]. It’s a screen-cast of my presentation at Flashforward in Boston last September. So if you want to know how to make Flash smoke, sparks, or blow things up, this is the best place […]

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General

Flash particle tutorial in Computer Arts magazine

[kml_flashembed movie=”/wp-content/uploads/manual/2008/sparkparticles.swf” width=”480″ height=”300″ FVERSION=”9″ QUALITY=”high” /] I was thrilled to have been asked to produce this Flash particle tutorial for Computer Arts magazine this month. I’ve taken you through the process of making a particle class from scratch and using it to create basic particle effects such as sparks and smoke. The March edition […]

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General

Papervision “billboard” particles

Following on from yesterday’s interactive Line3D, I’ve now also implemented a few new features in Papervision’s particle capabilities. We now have proper billboarding with a new particle material – MovieAssetParticleMaterial, and I’ve also implemented proper culling and interactivity for particles. And these changes have been committed to both the Effects branch and Great White. Here’s […]

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General

Papervision interactive Line3D

Just a very quick post to show you a little demo I’ve knocked up – Andy Zupko asked me if I could implement interactivity in the Papervision Line3D object, and it looks like it’s working… I’ll commit the changes to the code library tomorrow after I’ve had some sleep! But in the meantime, here’s the […]