See Creature
Took a day to extend the tentacle class to work on 360° and secondary motion from a parent node, but here it is, the first critter for my ocean. Thanks to Keith Peters book ActionScript 3 Animation, useful formulas section for getting me through this. It kicked my butt and fried my brain, but it’s so clear now. Onwards!
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Logarithmic Spirals
Spent last evening coding some circles & spirals in Flash. I love spirals!
A logarithmic spiral, equiangular spiral or growth spiral is a special kind of spiral curve which often appears in nature. The logarithmic spiral was first described by Descartes and later extensively investigated by Jakob Bernoulli, who called it Spira mirabilis, “the marvelous spiral”.
This kind of simple Math and lengthy tweaking of geometry animation is akin to whittling a piece of wood for me, whenever I have some free time and get the urge to write some code with no particular objective. It’s very relaxing.
It went through numerous iterations over the weekend and truly came to life when I started using Vectors and local3DToGlobal to convert the x,y,z coords to draw the 2D lines. Throwing in some random offsets from time to time helps keep it interesting. I used Math.sin and Math.cos a lot with random offsets to create smooth undulating motion that sometimes reminds me of jelly fish or some sort of under water plant waving around in the current. Other times it takes on a galaxy formation.
Watch it for 10 minutes or so and you will see some interesting spiral explosions. I can stare at it for 20-30 minutes.
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Web 2.0 Suicide Machine
Discovered this Web 2.0 Suicide Machine on Twitter. One day I might use it. 
http://www.suicidemachine.org/
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HTML Canvas & Processing JS
I have been experimenting with the new HTML 5 Canvas and trying to get up to speed on the syntax. As a seasoned Actionscript 3 developer, I find JS easy to understand but difficult to write. I find myself thinking flash and trying to work a flash approach. Anyhow, I have tried canvas with js and canvas with Raphael and now canvas Processing JS.
They all have advantages and drawbacks. Processing js is giving me the most fun for now and I can’t wait till they finish implementing the entire set of methods, or at least what’s left that can be implemented into canvas.
I have read some eager articles saying that this can replace Flash and will be the end of flash. This may be so at some point in the future, but I can tell ya right now, it’s not even close. With no dedicated VM it craps out if you try anything with a couple hundred worthy sprites on screen. Also, objects are painted onto the canvas and no longer exist as objects you can have a pointer to. You basically have to paint the the canvas each time with your updates, example: Processing uses pushMatrix() and popMatrix() to store and restore stage translations. This is pissing me off and I am still trying to get my head around it. I just want to move stuff around dang it. On the other hand, when you paint, you can have an infinite amount of detail without worrying about overhead, like when you pipe MC’s into Bitmap object in Flash.
It’s all good though and a step in the right direction as far as I am concerned. No plugins, no 3rd party expensive IDE’s etc. It’s all free range and organic, yay. Can’t wait to start working in some div’s, copy etc and growing the graphics and UI for html pages.
As with all things animation and drawing, I like to start off with basic math and growing plants, trees, etc. Processing has no real shading, 3d or drop shadowing built in right now and it’s kind of refreshing going back to the old way of thinking where you have to fake it all.
Here is a screen shot of some alien plant thing I am writing. It takes about 20 mins to draw the entire 360 view. The depth and dimension is all fake like I said, drawing all the highlights, shadows etc in separate passes with slight offsets. Demo of my first processing attempt here.
Rendering Plants with Processing JS
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Back in business
Thankfully Liam is ok and back in business.
Strike
Posted from my iPhone 3G using QikBlogr.
