[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 […]
Category: General
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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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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 […]
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Seamlessly looping video in Flash
How insane is it that there’s no way to seamlessly loop video in Flash? Very insane! That’s how!!! Here’s my requirement : I have a lot of prerendered 3D animations that need to loop. Spinning objects and stuff. So I’ve converted them to FLV and I’m loading them in with that really fiddly NetStream and […]
Wow what an honour to be asked to join the development team for probably the most exciting open-source project in the history of Flash! I’m not exactly sure what I’ll be doing yet, I’ve been speaking to Carlos, Ralph and John about various ideas that I have. Ideas such as 3D particle systems, dynamically rendered […]
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Snowing screensaver
OK OK it’s a year late, and not quite as cool as the one I tried to make last year (but failed due to some dodgy Zinc crashes), but hopefully it’ll make you feel all warm and fuzzy. Here’s a link to the last post, where you can see what it looks like. [Files no […]
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Flash snow in 15 minutes!
At FlashBrighton’s Big Day Out a couple of weeks ago, I set myself the somewhat crazy challenge of programming a dynamically generated snowstorm in fifteen minutes from scratch. No pre-written classes, no graphics, nothing! Which was really good fun! If a little scary. So when Kristin Henry, from GalaxyGoo recently asked if I’d be interested […]
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Animated Perlin Clouds in Papervision3D
The last Perlin noise experiments were fun but what’s the point of having 3D Perlin noise unless you render it in 3D? So I thought I’d map the realtime generated perlin bitmaps onto 3D planes in PaperVision. And here it is : [kml_flashembed movie=”/wp-content/uploads/manual/2007/perlinlayers02.swf” width=”440″ height=”385″ FVERSION=”9″ QUALITY=”medium” /] In this example there are 8 […]
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Animated Plasma in Flash
OK you can tell I’m fired up right now. I should be going to sleep but instead I’m blogging about a cool plasma effect I just programmed. Most of you won’t know that my programming career started on the Commodore Amiga. And my mentor was one of the leading demo coders, Jolyon Ralph. So, for […]
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3D Perlin noise in Flash
OK I admit it, Robert Hodgin got me thinking about Perlin noise. I thought it was just a nice swirly effect. Which of course it is. But it can be more than that! What if you have a particle and change its direction depending on the value of the noise? You have a nice smooth […]