actionscript microcosmos

After a short period of not posting anything new, I used the short break to, once again, develop a little Metaball snippet. Due to the fact that there are a lot of very good snippets out there (just have a look at Petri´s publications for example), dealing with Metaballs, I decided to add some 3D behaviours to my current release (´cause I didn´t see a lot of Flash realizations playing  with that already).

Well,  3D-Metaballs. When I started scripting this I didn´t know where I would come out with, because I noticed quite early, that this exposed to be a brain twister when you want a halfway fast and performant result. Furthermore, I didn´t want to use just plain textured blobs, so generating textures on the fly and mapping them constantly is a task to solve that shouldn´t be underrated.

Enough talk. Currently I published two versions. The first one uses fluent perlinNoise bitmapData as texture…

Launch (Flash10 Plugin needed!)
 

…the second one generates a bump-map, wich provides a kinda icy surface to each blob.

Launch (Flash10 Plugin needed!)

Both examples require a lot of performance to run accurately right now. I´m working on a third, more performant version at the moment, that hopefully will be a lot more faster anyway, so enjoy playing with those two approaches in the meantime.

Oh well, did I mention, that I definitively will release all the sources for my upcoming third version… ;)
 
 

Posted in: Astro, Flash, Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /