*drawlogic » DRAWING

AS3 Papervision3D 2.0 and 2D BitmapData Effects are Evolving

drawk — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 19:12:58 +0000

Andy Zupko is probably doing some of the coolest / useful work in performance and possible effects combining 2D and 3D. Using 2D BitmapData and papervision 3D it turns out you can create a parallel dimension of coolness that cannot fully exist by themselves.

Papervision 2.0 with these effects and if it is as pluggable as it seems is very good for games that lighting is a key component or effects. Imagine a game that can customize weapons with 2d effects in 3d, or rocket boosters, or fireworks or all kinds of inspiring things like changing the mood or environment such as fog, lighting etc… If you start taling about adding physics to all this it just gets too fun. Effects have always been there and around, but making this possible to have a semi-standard way to do this and if it is pluggable, this can lead to many engine advancements.

I think the PV3d team additions of Tim Knip and Andy Zupko have been very good and zupko era in PV3d has begun. Tim Knip is also very active and helping to really organize the ascollada formats and performance stuff like only drawing what is on screen.

Who needs Hydra now? j/k although having this now in papervision leads me to see a very fun 2008 ahead for Flash, it is also, if as pluggable as it seems, a bit like a shaders kit.

All those older great 2d effects merging into 3d from the good old days (some still going very strong) of praystation, yugop, levitated, neave (great 2d tv effects in neave.tv) , flight404 (moved to processing) and many others. And a new era of zupko [pv3d], mr. doob, unitzeroone [pv3d], fabrice [away3d] and many more a new 2d effects in 3d platform is emerging. This kit for papervision3d by zupko and Hydra is making the future glowing full of bright points, and lots of effect explosions.

Let’s hope papervision3d 2.0 it is released soon and it has zupko’s effects code in there.

Silverlight Mouse/Tablet Handwriting Recognition

drawk — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 10:49:35 +0000

Incremental Blogger has posted a very well done mouse gesture/handwriting/tablet PC silverlight demo. ByteArray has a similar script for flash with a Mouse Gesture library but this is very accurate to real handwriting.

AS3 Mouse Gesture Recognition

drawk — Mon, 21 May 2007 01:45:50 +0000

Didier Brun of ByteArray just keeps throwing down. Here is another great showcase of the power of AS3 and the tools that can be built with it, strongly based on alogorithms proven in other hardcore languages. This project is a Mouse Gesture Recognition lib for AS3 (demo)

Mouse gesturing can be used for recognition of letters, numbers or even just programmable actions by gesture. Imagine an application that allows you to just make a gesture (even if its not a drawing program or letter recognition) that would open when you make an open gesture, or close a file with a slash gesture. I have many uses for this planned. Very inspiring stuff.

A bit on the algorithm from Didier at ByteArray, I just don’t think it can be made any more simple:

Each letter is defined by a n ‘ 8-directions gesture sequence

The mouse moves are saved with the same 8-directions sensibility

A Levenshtein distance is calculated from each letter to the user moves

The algorithm return the best candidate (lowest levenshtein cost)

Usage

Example for the B :
gesture=new MouseGesture(stage);
gesture.addGesture("B","260123401234");
gesture.addEventListener(GestureEvent.MATCH,matchHandler);
 
function matchHandler(e:GestureEvent):void{
 trace (e.datas+" matched !")
}
This project is OPEN SOURCE under RPL License.
2007-05-17 v1.0 mouse_gesture_v1_0.zip

Best Actionscript Animation Packages (AS3)

drawk — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 03:35:30 +0000

There are many ways to animate in Flash and the best way is always scripting, or I mean code in AS3. Flash has grown up quite a bit and now has a very fun coding language in AS3, when programming games or animations scripting is the way to go. You can even do stuff like make a SMTP server/client using mime in it, ok maybe more useful is a binary socket asset loader.

The default mx.transitions classes in AS2 were good, there are much better filter and transition tools now in AS3 but also a bit more bulky than needed and many good animation kits have come along that help people animate with script. This can be great for team development when architecture is set within everyone’s styles, animation packages for example help to make it easy to have common code so that people can easily understand it. It can be bad when it comes to flash development when you open other’s work if they do not use at least some standard kits or conventions.

There are a few really excellent animation packages that you should know about.

The best AS3 animation packages

Animation Package (AS3 kit here)
Tweener (samples here like this papervision3d sample for 3d tweening)
Fusekit and ZigoEngine from MosesSupposes (updated as of late march early april development has started on an AS3 version – not sure of release so its sitting at third)

*All* of these kits allow for total control in a push mechanism to just push animation events onto clips in a dynamic way. This gives maximum flexibilty for team development and easily changed transitions, or completely random movements.

Fuse has some nice stuff in the works for ColorFX, SoundFX, and even a PaperFX controller for papervision3D.

ByteArray’s Raster.as Class Faster than the Adobe Graphics Libraries

drawk — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:42:40 +0000

ByteArray has been developing the Raster class which has an impressive demo of a raster engine to draw rather than the Adobe Graphics library included with Flash and it is much faster albeit pixelated (the nature of raster).

Here’s his latest listing of what it supports:

V1.3 API :
line()
triangle()
filledTri()
aaLine()
circle()
aaCircle()
quadBezier()
cubicBezier()

This class use
rastering : Bresenham algorithm
anti-alias rendering : Xiaolin Wu algorithm

Authors (contribution) :
Didier Brun (original class)
Drew Cummins (bezier curves)

Also check out a demo on the generalrelativity blog with some added beziers.

ByteArray’s Raster.as Class Faster than the Adobe Graphics Libraries

drawk — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:42:40 +0000

Here’s his latest listing of what it supports:

V1.3 API :
line()
triangle()
filledTri()
aaLine()
circle()
aaCircle()
quadBezier()
cubicBezier()

This class use
rastering : Bresenham algorithm
anti-alias rendering : Xiaolin Wu algorithm

Authors (contribution) :
Didier Brun (original class)
Drew Cummins (bezier curves)

Also check out a demo on the generalrelativity blog with some added beziers.

ByteArray’s Raster.as Class Faster than the Adobe Graphics Libraries

drawk — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:42:40 +0000

Here’s his latest listing of what it supports:

V1.3 API :
line()
triangle()
filledTri()
aaLine()
circle()
aaCircle()
quadBezier()
cubicBezier()

This class use
rastering : Bresenham algorithm
anti-alias rendering : Xiaolin Wu algorithm

Authors (contribution) :
Didier Brun (original class)
Drew Cummins (bezier curves)

Also check out a demo on the generalrelativity blog with some added beziers.