Branching Experiment: Flaming Hairball

After having my creative mojo refueled at Flash on the Beach, I’ve started playing around with some of my old experiments again. One of my favourite older experiments is my vein logic – it’s just such a beautiful example of recursion, and can be applied to so many things (like veins, vines, trees, more trees, and lightning) – so I decided I would rewrite and rearchitect it for ActionScript 3.

I barely managed to lay the groundwork for the new architecture before I got sidetracked by the file I was using to test it, and wound up building what I will affectionately call the Flaming Hairball.

You can check it out below.



I’m sure there will be many more experiments where that came from. I’ve built the new branching classes to be easy to work with, and I have a bunch of ideas. I’ll try to post the good and the bad so people can see some of the evolution.

I won’t be releasing this code just yet (as I mentioned, it’s nowhere near complete), but if you want to get the general idea for how it works, I did release the AS2 version of the source code here.

UPDATE: here’s another variation, playing with some of the colors and values:



Grant Skinner

The "g" in gskinner. Also the "skinner".

@gskinner

6 Comments

  1. I also did some experiments with branching some time ago, and this was the best result I got:

    http://www.ventdaval.com/testing/flash8/floriturator.html (click+drag)

    I was very satisfied with it aswell, but sadly I never really finished and released it, as with 90% of my lab work ^^

    Thought you might like it… 🙂

  2. Second example looks awesome, also Cay`s experiment is top notch!

  3. you made a chetto! 🙂

  4. It may be a little off topic but maybe not. I have been doing some experiments using AS3 to render some graphics, the Lorenz Attractor for example. The way I do it is using the graphics object of a sprite to call the lineTo method on an EnterFrame event. I looks like you are doing something similar. The strange thing is that if I run it in debug modus it works OK, but when I use Test Movie, it crashes every time after some iterations. My guess is that the garbage collector doesn’t have time to clear the memory so it keeps collecting stuff until it crashes. Have you faced this problem with your experiments or are you using a different strategy to draw things?

    Thanks

  5. Quick comment, I know it is an old post, but the flash keeps reloading like twice a second, plays for a bit, then restarts and repeats..

    Win Xp

    FF

    By the way, I was at the Efug meeting on the 31st, the guy you sat beside, I don’t know why, but I seemed to recognize you.. Maybe from the Dmd Expo at NAIT in November, who knows. Very interesting creations, I subscribed to the RSS to keep up.

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