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 […]

Someone pointed out that my previous magnifying glass demo wasn’t as clear as it could be. This one is a bit better than my previous demo because it uses a high resolution image (so the magnified view is full resolution), and the image has more straight lines so it’s a lot easier to see the lens distortion at work.

If you’re in the Toronto area, and are looking for a quick way to learn all of the amazing new features in Flash 8, this two day workshop might be for you. I think this workshop will be a lot of fun, it’s certainly a fun topic… we’re trying to make it accessible to any professional Flash designer or developer that’s interested. I might be bringing this workshop to other cities as well…

I’ve been prepping for my Macromedia MAX talk… One of the demos needed a magnifying glass, and rather than just build out a boring square one I decided to go all out with the new expressiveness features and build a nice visual one incorporating a photographed frame, photo lens shading, lens distortion (with DisplacementMapFilter), alpha masking, and a drop shadow.

This piece was inspired by cherry trees blossoming in Japan, as well as Japanese ink paintings. I wanted to create a system that grew generative trees where not only were the branches random but also every single blossom. Establishing rules that resulted in attractive but varied tree structures was definitely the challenge for this piece.

I’ve been playing a lot with Flash 8’s bitmap features in conjunction with webcams. This experiment simulates a snowfall with 400 snowflakes on screen, each with random size, rotation, speed and blur. That Flash can run it all fluidly is impressive in itself, but of course there’s more. It’s also monitoring the webcam input, detecting edges, and making the snowflakes settle gently on any horizontal surface they encounter – pretty cool.

Most of the Flash 8 demos released so far using BitmapData have been purely visual, so I thought I should release one of my experiments that focuses on function. This demo shows how you can use the new features in Flash 8 to carry out fast, pixel perfect shape based collision detection, and introduces my CollisionDetection class.

One of the things I’ve wanted for years in Flash was masks that have gradations in transparency. Now with Flash 8 we finally have them… sort of. I spent a few minutes whipping up a simple demo. It takes a few pictures (my own strange creations), and cross fades them using an alpha blendmode. I tossed together 3 crossfades…