Flashbelt 2009 is right around the corner. A truly exciting event where local flash designers and developers converge to see some amazing demo’s. A chance to learn what Adobe and flash masters are working on to push the boundaries and maximize the efficiencies of using flash in day-to-day work and play. The event is made up of both presentations and workshops and other events, and is appropriate for all experience levels.

Never been? Check out at least one presentation, you will undoubtedly go back for more. get yourself registered, space is limited.

Learn more about it and see who’s there this year.

Thanks to our friend Dave Schroeder at Pilotvibe, the founder and host

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…

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We recently completed an ‘Interactive Roof Designer’ Flash piece for Trimline Building Products. The objective was to create an area where prospective clients could customize the look of a house, and apply different colors from Trimline’s Distinction Tile and Distinction Slate composite roofing product lines. The final piece allowed for some interesting looking houses – here’s a break down of the process for each step…

1. CHOOSE HOME STYLE
3 photos were selected to represent different house styles. The idea at this point was to focus on the overall structure of the house – as the material, color and roof product would be customized in the following steps. ArcStone’s Nick Longtin created line drawings of each house. He did it all with his left hand while sipping a delicate blend of herbs and spices with his right.

2. SELECT MATERIAL & COLOR
This stage allows you to select a building material – brick, stucco or siding – and customize the overall color. Using ActionScript’s BitmapData, a custom ColorSelector class was written to avoid using a simple color picker with a limited palette. This allowed use of the full spectrum and a color intensity slider (saturation).

Surprisingly, the bulk of the work at this stage wasn’t the ColorSelector or Flash development – it was the laborious job of masking out the exposed building on all 3 house photos and applying brick, stucco and siding textures to to each house with perspective and shadows in mind. The textures where then desaturated to a medium gray and applied to each house in Flash as a MovieClip, set to BlendMode.OVERLAY. When the ColorSelector dispatches a CHANGE event – the new color gets applied to the selected texture movieclip (via ColorTransform manipulations).

3. DESIGN YOUR ROOF
The final step – applying different roof products – was achieved through the same techniques as step 2, but the tint color overlay was limited to the colors of the individual composite roofing products.

The final product allows visitors to visualize their dream roof in real-time, right in the browser, and without downloading any software. Other similar systems from Timeline’s competitors often rely on server side image manipulation that is slow, requires page refreshing, and just isn’t very interactive.

Flash is a great technology for visualizing products, and incredibly effective at drawing customers into site content by offering engaging interactive elements. If you’re interested in bringing a product or service to life on the web please contact us. We would be happy to discuss the wonderful options Flash and other technologies offer.

There’s just something about high quality photos fading in and out that always seem to take the feel of a site up a notch or two. Good examples are AMO’s very own Arizona Medical Group Management Association (AZMGMA) and Metro Atlantic Relocation Council (MARC). Both of these sites use a custom XML-driven Flash slide show, developed internally a couple of years ago. The ease of updates from using XML, and the aforementioned Flash flashy-ness make it a perfect solution for breathing life into an otherwise static page.

Click the photo to see the slideshow in action, using recent photos from Montana and Yellowstone, or read on to learn more …

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I had the opportunity to attend Flashbelt again this year. And it was awesome.

This year’s highlight was seeing Jared Tarbell speak again, who’s done amazing work in both Processing and Flash, and is a the co-founder of Etsy, an excellent marketplace for all things handmade! For those who have kids, or like wearing really small clothing, be sure to check out Orange Rhino for some sweet threads from our very own Jess Louwagie.

Jared’s session once again left me speechless. The work was refined and elegant, the music fitting, and the presentation seamless. What inspired me the most of about these speakers, however, was not just their work. It was how approachable they all were. And how apparent it was that their work was fueled by curiosity; a willingness to make mistakes and a stubbornness not to give up.

One of Jared’s pieces that caught my eye was a series renderings that used Perlin Noise to generate forms resembling an iris (of the eye, not the flower).

While analyzing some of his source code (special thanks to Jared for providing it), and listening to Eric Jordan’s mix, Indigo, it became apparent to me the potential of using BitmapData.perlinNoise() and BitmapData.getPixel() to achieve organic, pseudo-random results.

Read on to see my latest experiments – Click the images to see the full-version. They look better … (more…)

I had every intention of using my recently released SoundData class in an experiment with Papervision3D. I got pretty far: Picked out a good Armin Van Buuren track, had an interesting animation started; just hadn’t added the code to respond to the sound spectrum.

Unfortunately, once I loose a little momentum on one of these side projects, the likelihood of a bigger, better experiment stealing it’s lunch money gets pretty high. I grew rather attached to this latest experiment and, despite it’s somewhat ‘incompleteness’, I wanted to share it anyways.

Special thanks to Seb Lee-Delisle for the inspiration and all his particle work on Papervision3D!

Here’s the experiment. Enjoy! (there are several colors and speeds… so if you don’t like what you get on the first pass… refresh the page

As many of you know, I’ve been spending a bit of my time exploring the cool features in ActionScript 3.0 – some new, some not. Lately, I’ve been intrigued by the SoundMixer class which has a special method, computeSpectrum(), that essentially takes a snapshot of the wave of a streaming sound (or an embeded sound, but I’m talkin’ 100% code here)…

The finer details quickly boil down to binary data, but the power of this is the potential to create audio-powered animations in Flash.

After a refresher in Trigonometry, some tortellini, and a late night (or early morning), I’m pleased to present latest ActionScript 3 experiment!

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I spent a good portion of my holiday weekend sifting through the documentation for Papervision3D (let this load, it’s worth the wait!). Papervision3D is robust, open source ActionScript class library that aims to simplify the process of creating and animating 3D objects and effects in Flash.

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Just as promised, I have a more exciting experiment that makes use of the Grid Maker from my previous post. For those who caught the OOP reference in the title, the Mosaic Creator is actually not a subclass of the Grid Maker… although it probably should be.

After about $15 worth of Vanilla Lattes (which, sadly, is probably only 3), I’m pleased to introduce my Mosaic Creator – and AcionScript 3.0 experiment that dynamically creates a mosaic based on a few variables – photo, tile/cell size etc. (more…)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, just my keyboard was stirring, along side the mouse … (more…)