21 Aug 2009 : Cog animation
This cigarette crushing device forms part of an anti-smoking site for Pfizer. Animating the cogs conventionally proved impossible as there is no point where you can loop the animation and have the cog textures match up, they had to be animated using a tween engine(TweenLite). The initial problem was to ensure the cogs rotated at the correct speeds to 'mesh' as they would on a real machine. This is achieved by counting the number of teeth on each cog to work out the gear ratios. In the case of this animation I decided I wanted to rotate each cog 100 times and using the gear ratios I could work out the time it would take each cog to complete its rotations, and hence everthing stays in sync. Adding the cigarettes posed the usual set of problems when integrating timeline animation with actionscript animation, but it worked out well in the end.
20 Aug 2008 : Project Blackhole version 9
Two steps forward one step back. All the code is now converted to AS3, there is still a lot of optimising to be done. The laser is currently broken, so things will no longer explode and planets dont render anymore. As soon as all these bugs are fixed I'm going to start preliminary tests with nonoba multiplayer api.
11 Jun 2008 : Particle emitter version 1
After seeing Seb Lee-Delisle's particle talk at FITC Amsterdam I've been itching to do some particle experiments myself. The effect I wanted to achieve was like the old Odeon cinema intro - do you remember it? It looked like purple glitter cannons being filmed from above in slow motion with a soundtrack that went la la la la la la la da da ta ada da da! Take a look and see if it jogs your memory.
14 Nov 2007 : Project Blackhole version 8
Finally you can blow things up! Pythagoras' theorum is used to calculate the distance to any ship that is under the crosshair. If the ship is in range the laser will glow orange (in the left pane) and automatically locks to the centre of the target ship. After a few hits the target will explode, the explosion is done with png's which will be replaced with vectors at some point. The destroyed ship is removed from the render queue and never seen again.
18 Jan 2007 : Project Blackhole : Camera tests
The camera tutorial at Ahab's Math Tutorials formed the basis for this experiment. After rewriting the code into AS2 classes I worked on speeding up the calculations and most notably the way depth sorting was handled on the cube.
08 Jan 2007 : Ship viewer
This code was adapted from an excellent article at Macromedia explaining how to rotate a 3D object using Quaternions. Whilst being too complex to fully grasp the key thing about quaternions is they can be multiplied together to create a composite quaternion and supposedly require fewer calculations than with matricies. Apparently the camera positions in early Tomb Raider games are calculated using them.
I modified the code to add in my Cobra model (no easy task) and whilst I could rotate it using quaternions, I couldn't find a way to translate (move) it. There seems to be a bit of a debate as to whether quaternions are more efficient than matrix maths (Papervision didnt initially support them), however with matricies I'm on slightly firmer ground so I decided I would use matrix rotations from now on.
24 Dec 2006 : Image carousel
I'd used Jared Tarbell's cylinder image display on a couple of occasions previously, but as I was getting into 3D I was eager to see if I could produce something that gave more of a sense of 3D. The cylinder image display is a clever illusion using trigonometry and depth sorting, the pictures are just moving from edge to edge, but by changing their widths it gives the illusion that their path is circular.
My carousel was coded from the ground up in AS2, you can place the system at any position you want and still get the carousel effect. The pictures arn't properly distorted as Papervision does, they're just squashed, stretched and clipped, a neat little trick that saves oodles of processing power.
