Visual Advance | Blogthe personal and professional evolution of danny davis

A little while back I made an attempt at making dust in flash, and I would basically say I failed at it (though I didn’t give myself much time). I thought I would try it again. I am fairly happy with my first test. The hardest part is that you run the risk of it looking like snow if its falling too fast, but I kept its speed up more so you can see it easier.

Each particle is looking at the background and adjusting their opacity based on the surface they are over. So if it is in a dark area they tend to fade out, etc. Note: I claim no rights to the image used in my test. It is a random grab from Flickr.

Demo (click and hold your mouse down to see the particles over black)

Source

I wanted to give a little sneak peak of one of the experimental scripts I came up with. For now I am calling it a bitmap separator. Not sure if that title is appropriate for what is actually going on here. I guess a more appropriate title would be ‘Maker of bitmap layers based on color luminosity of a movieclip’. Not quite the same ring to it.

Either way, this isn’t at all the final product I wanted from it, but some of my tests have been fun and I wanted to post at least one of them to gain some intrigue.

Bitmap Separator

It isn’t often that I repost other people’s posts, but i have to give credit to the ‘Ten Things I Have Learned’ by Milton Glaser. Please go to the original article to read the full thing, but I wanted to pull a few of my favorite quotes that I believe in.

Point 3 talks about avoiding poisonous people. The test is to spend some time with that person.

“If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.”

Point 4:

“What professionalism means in most cases is diminishing risks…After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success.“

In point 5 he talks about how absurd the quote “less is more” is. He suggests a new saying “Just enough is more.” I think this statement struck me because of how obvious this statement should be, yet I have never heard it. I guess it has hints of laziness. I am sure a client would never want to hear ‘I did just enough to finish the site’. But to me ‘just enough’ implies perfection. Maybe I am looking at it with optimistic eyes.

On point 8:

“Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable… Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is.”

This may seem to be a direct jab at religion, but he goes on to apply it to the design field, and it should be applied to everything you do. To me scepticism is almost its own religion. Or perhaps it is the road some take to find thier own religion. Ironically, the best quote I could find to emphasize my point is a proverb:

“For the waywardness of the naive will kill them, And the complacency of fools will destroy them.” Proverbs 1:32

And lastly, on point 10:

“We can accept certain kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher knowingly sells us spoiled meat we go elsewhere. As a designer, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher?”

There are plenty of other good tidbits (and even a joke toward the end of 9 that I will be guilty of repeating) throughout the article.

Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser

I recently took a fresh look into my site Student Story, and realized things could be done a lot better on the coding side. It is a PHP based site, and when I first built it PHP wasn’t even on my radar of languages. I was pretty happy I was even able to make a full site using it at the time.

Now looking back on it with a good number of years coding in other languages, I am able to comprehend the code SOOO much easier. It actually reads like english to me now. I equate it to how people really know a lanauge once they can dream init. For me, once I can read it in my head like a sentence, rather than syntax, I feel confident int he language.

So I went back in and cleaned up some of the back-end that talked with my database and so forth. Basically cleaned up some security issues that were allowing bots to insert spam, and inject annoying malware into some of my other files.

Should all be fixed now. Look for a MAJOR update coming sometime soon as long as I can keep up the motivation.

studentstory.com

For those of you who don’t know about it, Snipplr is a handy site for people to share quick code snippets that they think may be handy to others (or just themselves). I created an account and have added a few little Snippets that I tend to reuse often. Mostly AS3 things, but I have included functions for loading xml, reading rss2 and atom feeds, removing all children from a holder, etc.

Take a look. Or don’t. Whateve’s.

Visual Advance on Snipplr

Please note that Snipplr has far more than just ActionScript so it is useful for everyone. They have every language I know of.

I have been playing around with some flowing formations lately which I have always avoided because they deal with the dreaded Math. Luckily my friend at Dyleeo helped me out with really understanding how to use sin and cos for smooth movement.

This first version was a test of leaves moving across the screen:
leafFormation_v2

The section version is leaves moving in place (as if the camera was following them):
leafFormation_v3

download source (both versions)

I just wanted to post some of my explorations I did in order to make The Generative Eye piece.

Ok, maybe I am not getting something, but I seem to always have the hardest time setting up a scene in Papervision3D to work the way I want it. I just want a very basic, simple setup to start from most the time. Then from there I can build on it. Please feel free to add your comments below for how wrong I am doing things, or how I am about to promote back practices.

1. (x, y) of the Papervision scene is the center of the stage. (x,y of flash is the top left), so I made a convertPosition function that moves it. I am sure this will totally screw things up once you start moving the camera around, but most the time when I am working on a Papervision project I just need a static camera, and the objects do minimal movement.

2. When you place an object (like a cube) in the scene, “front” is actually facing away from the camera. So I have setup the camera so it is on the other side of the objects (front = front, top = top, etc). This way my brain can comprehend.

3. Materials!!! I know this one is simple, but I always forget how to apply each type of material, so I setup a Material list for my sample cube that uses some of, what I think, are the more common Materials. I also created my own functions for making new materials quickly.

4. Swapping materials. I included one function that swaps a color material on the cube. Real basic, but you can build from there if you want to pass in your own material, etc.

Please note that I based this off of Tyler Egeto’s Basic World Setup Tutorial, so much credit goes to him. I simply built on what he had to address some of my own issues, and I have left a lot of his comments in there because he did such a good job of explaining things in detail.

If you have any of the same problems I do and want a place to start from go ahead and grab my source.

download source

I uploaded a video of The Generative Eye being, well, generated. At first it has this Matrix feel, but then once it fills it it takes on this ‘rain on a window’ feel. I am debating turning it into a screensaver. Check it out.

I just got back from my first gallery showing. It is at this cool cafe called Demitasse Cafe and they feature a new set of work every few months. One of my friends generally organized it and suggested I submit “one of those things I do”. It is the first time I have actually printed my work and I wasn’t completely satisfied with the results, but it was very good to see how the digital work translated outside the monitor. I think the main thing that was lost was all the tiny details you can see on screen of each individual shape of the “brush” that paints the picture.

Here is the final piece and some details: