Painting with Physics (AS3, Box2D)

Looks like my Painting with Physics tutorial from god knows how long ago now is up on the Computer Arts site for all to download as a nice PDF.

Actually, I was looking for my 8-page “minimag” on buiding iOS apps with Flash CS5 from issue 181 back in…. November maybe? Can’t find it anywhere. I’ll stick it up here if I come across it.

palmerama Ltd

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m now making the big jump to being my own boss and the master of my own destiny. I really couldn’t be happier. Five years at magneticNorth and two-and-a-half at LOVE have been simply marvellous, but as of Monday November the 8th, I shall be freelance and proud – off into the big wide world as a one man band.

So hopefully someone out there will need some cool games making, some AS3 coding, some Flash designing (oh and coding on that link – just go with it), a spot of writing, an interactive installation or maybe just something nice for Xmas. I’ve made plenty of lovely interactive stuff for people like Diesel, Sony PS3, the BBC, Kellogg’s, Warburtons, Dr Martens, Vauxhall, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Umbro, if that helps.

Please say hello on email, twitter or LinkedIn and you’re on my site now, in case you were wondering what this was.

Cheers. As you can see above, I’m visibly excited.

New CA Tut Sneak Peek

Just finished another Computer Arts tutorial, this time with physics in it. You know – Box2D and that. So here are a couple of (COMPLETELY ORIGINAL, honestly…) sneaky peeky pics:

Computer Arts Tutorial Online

Now it’s out of print, Computer Arts have stuck my first AS3 tutorial from Feb up online, so it’s all yours for free. You lucky people.

U+262E: Two Fingers To War

Oh look, I’ve made a little video showing some of the best pics from our interactive photo booth/wall thing at United Underground 2 the other week for Ctrl.Alt.Shift.

United Underground 2 was an event held on the theme of conflict, so we encouraged people to show their support for peace by giving two fingers to war with the classic “V” for victory gesture. Their poses were displayed on a huge screen behind the performers, in a constantly-changing demonstration of unity.

Here’s Dorothy’s video:

U+262E: Two Fingers to War from Dorothy on Vimeo.

Photo Wall AIR App!

Off down to That London tomorrow with our video camera, a brand new iMac and a lovely AIR app by Jamie. Will report back. Looks like it works!

AS3 PrintCanvas update: Loupe and Display

Check out the demo. But don’t just click on the swf when it comes up. A click saves an A2, 300dpi PNG. Just be warned that this could crash your browser, depending on memory. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Got some nice new features into PrintCanvas. It’s all very well having a massive BitmapData for print, but it’d be nice to see what it’s doing on-screen without actually shoving the whole thing into the display list. Particularly when doing time-based generative stuff, I want to watch it happen!

I’ve built this into PrintCanvas using a matrix to pull out a scaled version for display. You can easily return this display Bitmap with

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createDisplayBitmap($width:Number):Bitmap

Stick that on your stage, then in a Timer, EnterFrame or whenever you need it, call

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updateDisplayBitmap();

to refresh the BitmapData linked to the Bitmap. Simple.

Then I thought well, this is nice and quick, but really I want to see what’s going on at pixel level. So I built in a loupe that returns a 100% window on the big BitmapData. Just pass a width and a point on the display Bitmap – usually the local mouse position – into

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createLoupeBitmap($centre:Point, $width:Number):Bitmap

to get another Bitmap back. Then refresh it as above by calling

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updateLoupeBitmap($centre:Point);

In the demo above, I’ve stuck the loupe Bitmap to the mouse and masked it with a circle because it looks nice. So there. And the blue squares aren’t intended as anything pretty – they’re just there to show it updating and give you something to look at with the loupe. I’ll get something nice going soon, I promise.

I’m pretty impressed with the performance on this, even on my 4 year old MacBook Pro! If you consider in the demo it’s getting both sets of data from an unseen A2 canvas at 300dpi, every frame, that’s not bad. Seems a good deal faster still in the standalone FP10 player/IDE for some strange reason.

So here, have the code if you must.