I’ve been putting some thought lately into the best way to render shadows in AS3. The built-in DropShadowFilter is perfect for most situations – particularly headlines and simple movie clips – but it lacked perspective control, at least for what I was envisioning…

Here’s the technique I used:

1. Created a BitmapData instance, and added it to the display list as a Bitmap
2. Added 500 hearts to a container sprite – drawn programatically with a custom Heart class, similar to the code used in this Processing experiment. Their size and rotation was controlled using Perlin noise – following a random path.
3. One the hearts were all drawn … I used the BitmapData.draw method to draw the contents of the container sprite into the BitmapData instance.
4. I used the BitmapData.applyFilter to desaturate and apply a slight Blur to the shadow.
5. Finally, the shadow’s y position and scaleY properties (set when added to the stage) were used to give the shadow a more realistic perspective.

Tags: ActionScript, AS3, Experiments, Flash

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 4:43 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.