I was recently browsing through the SWFs and FLAs I’ve collected over the last few years because I thought they were interesting or unique. During my reminiscing, I stumbled on this vein-1 experiment by Mike Johnson from May 2002.
It caught my eye, and I decided to rebuild it in OOP, and spice it up a bit. I wanted to make it look like an old anatomy textbook come to life. My fiance thinks it’s creepy, so I must have done ok – judge for yourself though, the result is below (warning: it’s fairly CPU intensive, and requires FP7).
I’ll be releasing the code to this once I’ve cleaned it up a bit. I’ll also be talking a bit about how it came together at my upcoming conference sessions.
Also, to give credit where due, the original experiment by Mike was part of a 25 lines experiment. I’ve nearly doubled that for the Vein itself, and then nearly doubled it again to add camera motion, grids, and labels.
UPDATE: The source code for this experiment is available here.
Very nice! Even though it’s red, the growth pattern looks more neural to me. Interesting.
I love it when ideas grow like this–the best part of the Flash community…well any community 🙂
yo mang,
that looks real cool. even better would be if you set _quality = “LOW” by default
reminded me of this: http://levitated.net/daily/levMainVein.html (FLA downloadable)
I’d love to see the FLA when ready, drop me a line..
// kevin
Yeah, does look pretty good on LOW, and you get almost the full 40fps. I’ve updated the HTML to show it in low quality by default.
I was too impatient to wait for the source 🙂
http://www.professorfripples.com/mxlab/veins.html
Nice job Grant – looks good and nice to see new life brought to something that I haven’t thought about for so long! 😉
A little background: I was originally inspired by Tarbell’s work and this came about because of a contest on were-here to see what could be done with Flash (mainly because of the drawing API) in 25 lines of code or less. I had actually had a better version that still fit in the 25 lines that I have long since lost and never got around to trying to recreate it.
I like the addition of the camera and “impulses” a lot, though it may be nice to have a little more frequent movement to the camera as it creates a really spacey feeling to it, imo.
Maybe you won’t be quite as lazy as I and actually make this into a screensaver (hint)! Or run with my other desired direction of this and bring it into 3d. The math would be pretty easy for it, just a matter of retooling the drawing and camera 😉
So you gonna post the source? This is REALLY cool — I’d love to look under the hood.
Hey look at that — I found it. For others’ benefit:
http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2005/01/source_code_var.html
Its nice, keep going
Its nice, keep going
thats pretty cool holmes