actionscript microcosmos

Not to be confused with those rotating entities storm chasers are looking for - we are now going for some little oldschool 2D twist deformations and 3D twisty tubes as known from the Demoscene.

It all started a few weeks ago when I took notice of this excellent Javascript based Twister Joachim Viide did for the JS1K contest. Nice one! And well, I had programmed several ‘Twisty´s’ by myself so I instantly head off with my excited interest and dig out some twisted stuff from the past. Ok, to scale down the expectation in general I´ve to say, my results aren´t even coming close to ‘twister masterpieces‘ like shown in TBC´s ‘Receptor‘- or FRequency´s ‘Ergon‘-demo. Otherwise, that still isn´t any sort of reason for not digging into that topic and go for own results! ;)

Therefore, let´s warm up with some little finger exercise and start twisting 2D based bitmapData. Looping through all xy-positions within the image scan-line´wise allows us to make a time-displacement illusion over the x- and y-axes like ‘vector slime‘. A few enhancements here and there leads us to some veritable deformed results like this small snippet here.

Launch

Btw., the procedural wavy LUT-pattern I generated just for the use of colorizing my twister - I somehow like watching at it as standalone solution too…

Launch

Generating 2D based twisters is great fun anyway but as to me that´s just half the battle - playing around in 3D gets the kick out of it! With that saif I worked a lot of my past evenings programming some sort of ‘Twisty forest’ - as David named it like that when I showed it to him first.Basically it´s just a cam-flight through a gathering of lots of twisters, spinning-, twisting- and bending around in a foggy environment. Want to give it a try and dive into ‘Twisty forest’? Here you go:

Launch

Lastly let me recommend a few more twisters and twisty-like stuff to you that really is suitable to serve as an inspiration:

• Divy and Jac´s Blockparty 2010 invitation
• Ralph Hauwert - Weird Thing 3
• Yoyofr - Rubber fun

Enjoy! And maybe see you at FOTB in Brighton soon?

Posted in: Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /