Antlers

antlers

One last ice photo from yesterday’s ice adventure. Again, retouching was great fun, so maybe I should get out and shoot more than once every six months.

January 31st, 2010 by Ad.
It's all about the photos I've taken | No Comments »


Weird Ice Splash

Ice Palace

Skeleton

Went for a drive over Snake Pass this afternoon. Came across the other side and a pond had overflowed and flooded the road, so ice had kept freezing on the bushes as cars kept splashing them. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Click through for the big pics on Flickr.

car_splash

I can recommend extensive dodging and burning to make ice sparkle. It’s very therapeutic.

January 30th, 2010 by Ad.
It's all about the photos I've taken | No Comments »


40199 Sids

40199 Sid James Heads

I’d been wanting to play with Mario’s “image foam” experiments since I saw him present them at FOTB a couple of years ago and finally got round to it yesterday. The Late, Great Sid James was just the first image to hand. Here’s a disturbing detail:

sid_closeup

Turns out Mario never posted the source, or at least I can’t find it. So I had to work it out for myself, which I suppose is better really. At least now I more or less understand Bitmapdata.hitTest(), getBounds() (yeah, never really needed it before), finding transparent pixels, etc. It’s set to keep scaling up the Sids to fill transparent areas till the space is 95% full, which equated to 40199 swirling Sid heads. Try not to stare at the big one on Flickr for too long. You’ll go into a Carry On trance.

So next I need to get this onto my PrintCanvas and try using different images and rotations for grey levels – like you would with perlin noise – to make up a huge picture. Should be fun. Might use porn…

Oh and cheers, Jamie, for putting me straight on some of the more complex Bitmapdata stuff!

January 28th, 2010 by Ad.
It's all about the experiments / r 'n' d, flash | No Comments »


Round Thing

Ikea light

A £3.50 Ikea light, from above, pepped up on with Photogene on the phone. Love the way the 3GS handles white balance and focus.

January 28th, 2010 by Ad.
It's all about the experiments / r 'n' d, iphone, photos I've taken | No Comments »


Tut tut

Here’s a little sneak peek from my first Computer Arts tutorial on how to make proper freaks. Warped with AS3, of course. Six fingers crossed it should be in there sometime next month.

warp_preview

January 19th, 2010 by Ad.
It's all about the LOVE., experiments / r 'n' d, flash, work i've done for money | 1 Comment »


Easy AS3 Print Canvas

About 18 months ago, I’d been looking for a decent way to circumvent AS3’s annoying BitmapData pixel size limit to easily produce print resolution generative stuff. According to livedocs:

In AIR 1.5 and Flash Player 10, the maximum size for a BitmapData object is 8,191 pixels in width or height, and the total number of pixels cannot exceed 16,777,215 pixels. (So, if a BitmapData object is 8,191 pixels wide, it can only be 2,048 pixels high.)

Keith Peters had the same problem, but there in the comments was a mention of this fantastic hack by Martin Rädlinger at formatlos. BitmapUnlimited does some clever hack thing to do with a GIF that somehow tricks the player to make bigger bitmaps. Works great too.

So in order to make print res bitmaps even easier, I’ve wrapped it in PrintCanvas, a simple little class of my own. Here’s how to use it:

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import tv.palmerama.display.PrintCanvas;
import tv.palmerama.utils.CustomEvent;

var printCanvas:PrintCanvas = new PrintCanvas();
printCanvas.addEventListener("PrintCanvas ready", onPrintCanvasReady);
printCanvas.createPaperType("A2", 300, "landscape", 0xFFFF00);

function onPrintCanvasReady(e:CustomEvent):void
{
addChild(new Bitmap(e.params.bmd));
printCanvas.saveImage("PNG", "PNG_test_image");
}

So that creates an A2, 300dpi, yellow landscape canvas, adds it to the stage in a bitmap once it’s ready and saves it as a PNG. You can have a JPG too with quality setting, plus saveImage() returns its FileReference object in case you want to track progress etc. It can take a while.

Basically, you can have any size you want at any dpi. But beware memory issues! This eats it fast, so the A2 at 300dpi in this example could easily be a killer. That said, currently supported sizes from what I could find on Wikipedia are:

A0, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, Letter, Legal, Tabloid.

I couldn’t seem to find out much about standard American sizes beyond Letter and Legal (oddly, on the internet). Any help much appreciated.

Grab the zip here.

One big drawback of BitmapDataUnlimited is that it can’t handle filters beyond the usual BMD size. EDIT: See Martin’s comment below. That saves me some work! I’m only really bothered as the look of the screen res images I was playing with a long time back played heavily on the use of glows. Maybe now I can get on with making pretty things again, this time big enough to go on the wall.

January 18th, 2010 by Ad.
It's all about the experiments / r 'n' d, flash | 7 Comments »