Hour glass. January 20, 2009 at 7:46 am
While sitting in a delayed train last week, waiting to be moved up in spite of heavy snowfalls, the idea of a little image processor gadget crosses my mind. Unfortunately, developing it over the last days totally digressed me from finalizing my 3D-Metaball concept, but I had to get this gadget out of my head first, so I preponed it.
Well, the main idea was to design an image processor, that scans a picture line by line (starting on y = 0 and x = image.width/2) and snatches every pixel he comes upon. After that, each pixel gets added into a vector-pool wich manages its xy-indent, movement, and stack sorting at last. So each pixel streams to a defined drop zone at first, flows down to the bottom (y = image.height) until hitting a predecessor - then the pixel gets sorted onto the heap. So anyway, if we bundle all that tasks, we obtain a nice kinda hour glass effect (wich explains the odd title of this post).
At the beginning, you should wait a second or to, so that the effect can establish, I think it looks even more suspenseful when the heap is accumulated to a certain degree…
Launch (Flash10 Plugin needed!)
As always, dealing with hundreds of pixels coincidentally can force the FlashPlayer to its knees, but I think, ~92fps constantly is nothing to sneeze at (download the sources).
Now, having gotten that much-needed rocket science out of my system, I’m going to complete my Metaball3D concept… I´ll try to do if nothing else comes amiss ;)
Sweet little idea. Pixels falls too regularly for it to feel like an actual hourglass.
I enjoy looking through your little filters, it’s cool stuff.
This is some very creative stuff Frank. Very inspirational.
I’ve been meaning to attempt a 3d hourglass preloader for sometime but haven’t tried yet. Not sured if the player would handle well the necessary physics calculations if I attempted a realistic fine grain particle movement.
Your hourglass dissolve is really cool and would be awesome as a transition effect if things were sped up a bit.
hey evan,
of course you could do this in 3d with physics (by using box2das3 or the like).
…and, spoken from a present-day perspective, you can speed the whole thing up by using alchemy… ;)