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.
I can recommend extensive dodging and burning to make ice sparkle. It’s very therapeutic.
It's all about the photos I've taken | No Comments »
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:
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!
It's all about the experiments / r 'n' d, flash | No Comments »
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.
It's all about the experiments / r 'n' d, iphone, photos I've taken | No Comments »
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.
It's all about the LOVE., experiments / r 'n' d, flash, work i've done for money | 1 Comment »
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:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | 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.
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.
It's all about the experiments / r 'n' d, flash | 7 Comments »
I know some more hardy Mac users than I have forced themselves to get used to some flavour of Eclipse (FDT or FlashBuilder), but I just cannot bring myself to do it. It’s a Windows app that still feels like a Windows app on OSX. It just looks a mess to me. Nearly every other app I use on a daily basis functions as I expect OSX apps to function – beautifully and intuitively – with the notable exception of just about anything by Adobe, but that’s to be expected.
Thus, I love TextMate. It’s light, it’s quick, it’s OSX to the core and its sidebar is the Finder. But the main thing that makes TextMate great is its expandability with Bundles. Simon Gregory has for a while now been maintaining the only AS3 bundle worth a look and a good while ago now it got really, really good with the addition of text completion.
Check out the video:
Not to be too melodramatic, but this little bundle has changed my life. No word of a lie. Recommended.
It's all about the flash | 2 Comments »
Just thought I’d repost Thrillinocuous, my mashup of LCD Soundsystem’s “Get Innocuous” and Michael Jackson RIP’s “Thriller”, in honour of the untimely death of LCD Soundsystem. May they rest in peace.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
It's all about the music, stuff and nonsense | No Comments »
