This experiment grew (ha!) from my previous vine-g and flowerGarden experiments, and actually preceded the Sakura experiment. It draws a randomly branching and meandering vine with leaves and randomly generated flowers using some Flash 8 magic including: run-time DropShadowFilter and BevelFilter; iteratively applied ColorMatrixFilter to fade back older vines; custom bitmap caching (or blitting) to allow continual generation without slowdown.
It also uses a ColorMatrix class I wrote in conjunction with ColorMatrixFilter to hue shift the flowers. I will be releasing this class for free shortly after Flash 8 is released – it is a huge time saver.
The latest Flash 8 player is required. The longer you let this run, the nicer it looks IMHO.
One of the cool things about this experiment is that I can run it at almost any dimension without a performance penalty (except the run-time filters), which allowed me to generate big (1920×1200) desktop images for my 23″ Cinema Display. You can check out these big images and/or download a desktop picture for yourself below.
You should make screensavers out of these. Would be pretty sweet. Of course, dunno if the screensaver to flash software out there supports FP8.
I wish they’d hurry up and release flash 8 already – lol, I want to play too 🙁
This looks awesome, I have to be picky tho, can’t let you get too big headed, why is there a slight ‘stepping’ as the vine grows? is that a performance issue or does it always grow in incremental sections?
Another thought I had was that with all this new bitmap control is there a way to save out images? I’m guessing not directly, but was contemplating the speed a performance hit of sending some kind of gzipped (think there are classes for flash that do this) bitmap/binary data to a php script or similar that assembles real image files.
amazing! never thought programming would lead to such a beatiful art… maybe u could make the fadeout slower so more vines are visible, so it will look more like jungle 🙂 maybe some blurfilter and zoomout, ok, ok, im dreaming 😀
Josh – definitely going to look at making some of these experiments into screensavers… you’re not the first to suggest it. 🙂
Jon – it does slow down a little when there are a lot of branches and flowers drawing at the same time, which can cause some jerkiness. The ColorMatrixFilter is also applied in increments, which can make the background look a little jerky if you watch it carefully. Trust me, I would LOVE an image out capability! Free copy of gProject to the first person that writes a viable JPEG compression algorithm in Flash 8.
Hey Grant! Followed to your comment about free copy of gProject (did you mean gPanel?), I took it as a challenge 🙂 Though it`s not 100% in Flash, it still provides this “image out” capability! Experiment takes included “img” instance, pushes it into bitmapData, generates color info, sends to PHP which generates image with GD libraries from received data. You might want to rewrite data sending with remoting, as the String data(from image) should be compressed efficiently! I`m just lazy, and it`s already late, gotta go to sleep 🙂
My experiment: http://www.m3style.lv/bo/experiments/flash2jpg/
P.S. how about that free copy? 🙂
Hey Grant! Followed to your comment about free copy of gProject (did you mean gPanel?), I took it as a challenge 🙂 Though it`s not 100% in Flash, it still provides this “image out” capability! Experiment takes included “img” instance, pushes it into bitmapData, generates color info, sends to PHP which generates image with GD libraries from received data. You might want to rewrite data sending with remoting, as the String data(from image) should be compressed efficiently! I`m just lazy, and it`s already late, gotta go to sleep 🙂
P.S. how about that free copy? 🙂
sorry, double post, the comment didn`t come up at first time :/
well? 🙂 (delete those 2 comments, this one too, LOL) any comments?
Very very nice!
Remember me the old “Flowers” job from Daniel Brown(http://www.play-create.com).
1) http://www.play-create.com/pieces/flowers.html
2) http://www.play-create.com/pieces/flowers.html
Cheers!
Joca
hey – i’m a graphic designer, which no knowlege of flash unfortunately. i’m working on a website for a company and my ideas were along these lines – would i be able to hire you to do some work on the website? if you’re interested, please get back to me and i’ll give you more details (not on a public forum).
your work is great,
s