actionscript microcosmos

As this years Flash on the beach is coming closer, it´s about time to finalize my latest stuff and experiments for my upcoming session (… ‘and hell yeah!’, I got lots of yet unpublished things & demos to show this time). In doing so there´s lot of snippets and try-outs that I just used as tests to get certain results or insights and that didn´t make it any further.

Including following little snippet which I just developed to test possible maximum speed of combining Flash10 + Pixel Bender to use for raymarching a set of basic volumes like: a torus, cubes, spheres and cylinders (all of whom formulas to create ´em can be found here). Keep in mind that prementioned combination (Flash10/Pixel Bender) is not pretty well known for it´s supersonic speed ´cause of not having GPU acceleration, so I was quite sceptic of what I could probably tease out there.

But, surprise surprise!!! …gettig it all up and running by having >55FPS on average was a big ‘aha moment’ that I didn´t expect AT ALL! This was even better then I ever expected - so I took this little test as a basis for developing a demo which will first be shown at forthcoming FOTB (…interested? Better get your ticket before last ‘Early Birds’ are out of stock).

Need an appetiser? Bon appétit… (loading the audio first of all  may take a little while)

Launch (origin size)

Launch (fullscreen)
 
Well, like a said before - this is probably my last post before FOTB because I´ll now take my time to finalize the demos and experiments for my talk - so, see you there!

Posted in: Pixel Bender, Flash, Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /
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…or the like, that´s what you get if you create patterns on a sphere, zoom into and point the camera at it! Bygone times I was a bit too quiet  at this place, but finally I found some time to again start with working out new ideas and snippets.

This… plus I´m working on a new demo right now for my next talk at upcoming ‘Flash on the beach - conference‘ this September, which I´m already super-excitedly looking forward to!

Well, as I mentioned already, ‘Blobsphere‘ is an odd self-given titel for a little pattern-experiment thats projected onto a sphere. We have a lightsource and bump as parameters to modify and play with. Unfortunately this whole piece wouldn´t run by programming it in Flash only, but thanks to Pixel Bender, and a nifty little trick for optimizing the bump-mapping,  we now can run that ‘baby’ on a resolution of 800×600 pixels. Yummy! ;)

Stop talking, Frank? Ok, here you go:

Launch

So, until September, still lots of things and ideas to work on for me and my FOTB session, but tickets are already on sale and John once again managed to arrange a great line-up of speakers, so go and get yours as long as prices are low! See you at least in Brighton…
 

Posted in: Pixel Bender, Flash, Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /
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This year´s gonna be awesome! I personally got invited to give talks at upcoming FITC Amsterdam and FFK 2011 Cologne conferences so far (hurry, you may still get the super early bird tickets for both conferences), as well as going to travel to New York together with a decent lineup of friends of mine (like David, Nicolas and Dominic) and visit the promising Geekybynature conference there. Best thing in view of my forthcoming talks is, that I´ll have an utterly new presentation, jam-packed with unreleased new experiments and snippets I´m already burning to show you.

Reverse of the medal is, that working on new stuff and preparing my new talk means not to have that much spare time to release snippets alongside. Until by now…

Launch

The little vortex pixelshader listed above is a Pixel Bender shader implementation of  Mic´s famous Monjori 1k demo-release. Watch out! Yet another effect referring to the demoscene is crossing your path, and of course feel free to snag the full sources here. So let´s heat up for this year and dive into the vortex.
 

Posted in: Pixel Bender, Flash, Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /
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Procedurally generated tubes and tunnels are one of the classic effects known from the Demoscene. It´s like every brilliant demo simply deserves a cam-flight through an infinite tunnel or the like. For example, ‘You should‘ from Haujobb (a demo group) uses a very elegant flight through a tunnel composed of cubes, or better still, ‘Sult‘ by Loonies (guess what…also a demo group) , which puts forward some very stunning tunnel creations!

So even when it comes to Flash10 and its actual non-hardware accelerated status there are tons of techniques to begin the tunneling. But lets start a bit more basic and use an oldschool technique to build a very retro styled tunnel. The trick in the example up next is to precalculate all distances and angles that we need and store that informations in 2 Lookup tables first, so that we get rid of expensive function calls like ‘Math.sqrt’ or ‘Math.sin’ which are quite expensive when it comes to performance. If we follow that simple rule we easily can setup and handle a very large (800×600) oldschool tunnel:

Launch

All right. Perhaps I shouldn´t leave it like that because this approach is way too ancient for sure! And inspired by all those great demos I got an idea for a little 3D camflight too - working title: ‘Tube Pilot’. The underlying idea was to dive into the inside of an 3D cylinder which is textured with a highly glossy/metallic surface. Well, creating texture-materials and behaviours that imitate specular surface conditions like reflections, glossiness, vignettes and light falloffs isn´t that easy to manage with Flash only because you need to calculate lots of pixels at the same time. So I decided to write some Pixel Bender based shaders which are able to process those necessary pixel manipulations a lot more faster compared to a pure Actionscript solution. Took me longer as I expected to write all those little filters, but by now I feel quite comfortable with the results (you can launch the specular texture creation as extract if you feel like).

Finally the fun part: Finding some interesting settings to rotate, zoom and move the camera on its way through the tube. And hell yeah… the actual state of affairs looks like this:

Launch

p.s.: The last six month I spend lots of my time digging deep into some Molehills to prepare demos and stuff for my new upcoming talk called ‘Realtime (hard)‘ - which I´m gonna give for the first time at upcoming FITC Amsterdam next year. For that reason I´d like to invite you all to come and visit upcoming Flash Platform Come Together in Cologne (11.12.2010, SAE Institute). It´s a COSTLESS meeting! There I´ll do my actual talk ‘Triangle Affairs’ for the last time and, for good measure, show a little sneak preview (a.k.a a demo) of what my latest Molehill generated stuff looks like and what you probably can expect from me next year…

Oops, did I mention that the all smart David Lenaerts (derschmale.com) will give a talk there too?

Better be there!

Posted in: Alchemy, Pixel Bender, Flash, Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /
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Ray tracing is one of many techniques to render images with a computer by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects (Reference: Wikipedia). Ray tracing has been used in production environment for off-line rendering for a few decades now, but in times of increasing computing speeds and due to the high quality of the visual effects it achieves, ray tracing is becoming more and more applicable for interactive and animated rendering. Yeah, real time ray tracing! Sounds good in the abstract - but of course mostly fails when it comes to Flash which has no hardware acceleration at all…

Ok, there have been attempts building real time raytracers with Flash in the past and probably Strille´s raytracer was worth mentioning in recent years, but a few days ago I took notice of Simo´s fantastic approach of real time ray tracing. In that case the entire calculations are done with Pixel Bender and Flash just draws the final result. Not forgetting Ralph´s raytracer at this moment, but his example doesn´t show all of its power by far because if you ever visited one of Ralphs sessions you´ll see that his raytracer took giant strides from then on!

Seeing all this great approaches recently I resolve upon writing my own little raytracer by not using Pixel Bender but Alchemy as my weapon of choice. I decided to stay close to Simo´s setup so we finally can compare framerates aso. So, after a few eves and nights of tweakings and optimizations I got my raytracer running ~32fps, so here we go…

Launch (click stage to switch movement)

It´s still a very basic raytracer, so no refractions, Fresnel, noisy bump or other procedural texture mapping, but it runs very smooth and that´s a good beginning so far. Lastly, believing in the Flash community and that open source helps on developing all that great stuff we can use with Flash today, feel free to catch the sources.

Enjoy!
 

Posted in: Pixel Bender, Astro, Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /
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Again at last, and due to the fact upcoming FFK10 conference waits right in front of the door, I finally got some time to give some blobs a new coat of whitewash (naturally it needs my vacation to do so… that figures!)
And indeed there´s nothing better than sitting in front of the chimney at your Scottish vacation Highland-lodge, generating some Space Goo. And as a result we achieve yet again, some nice little mass mindless bubbling around into time and space.

And let me tell you, this little space soup reacts quite well to music too, so you may wait whilst the track is loaded and maybe cheat some time simply rotate those chubby fellows in space…

Launch

Well, there´s so much more to show and speak about - but let´s do this at this years FFK10 conference in Cologne next time. Hope to see you there!
 

Posted in: Pixel Bender, Flash, Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /
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What happens actually if  innocent blobs burst upon sounds from Andre Michelle? Well, they tempt to boom. But let´s tell this from the start. Last weekend Andre released a couple of new quite experimental tracks, one of them was ‘Method‘ which I enjoyed from the start. At the very time I was working on some new fluid blob-experiments and -snippets,  and I quickly decided to combine my next release with Andre´s sound once more (thanks for permitting me Andre!). Therefore, now it´s the second time after my previous release ‘Chroma Drift‘ where I used ‘Overflow‘ which was produced by Andre too.

So, this time the blobs react on the sound in many ways while constantly merging themselves into 3d-space. Moreover I wrote a couple of Pixel Bender based Shaders ( the fun part! ) and added them to the setup. All things considered and BoomBlobs arise!

You can use your mouse to change the rotation of the blobs, but yet again, you first have to wait until the sound is loaded… Ohhh and you may ignore the first 10- up to -20 seconds of crackle and noises - that´s a matter of taste admittedly(!) - but then, when the beat starts BoomBlobs move into gear…

Launch (turn on your speakers!)

Enjoy!
 

Posted in: Pixel Bender, Astro, Flash, Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /
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I just got feedback that I´m in for FITC Amsterdam 2010. Gee! I´m very excited and very looking forward to give a “Return of the blobs - RELOADED” talk there. “Whew” - and I´ll show lot´s of my new unpublished experiments then like isosurfaces, blob-meshes, 3D metaballs (the next generation then!), as well as filter- and effect programming. All together dealing with techniques to generate and use 2D-/3D liquid masses, fluid or gooey behaviours real time at runtime.

Retrospectively treated I really have to say it was a great conference year for me by now. I recently got lot´s of opportunities to gave talks, and it all started with FFK09 in Cologne this year (thanks again Marc for giving me that initial chance) and not forgetting FOTB (thanks for having me John) where I showed my Meta.Piece demo for the first.

So far so excited! See you…
 

Posted in: Pixel Bender, Astro, Flash, Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /
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Monday has arrived and I just couldn´t resist to release my latest study right before this working week moves into gear.  As most of my recent works had a lot to do with Flash10 native 3d methods, I once more decided to create something based on this features. Actually ‘Chroma Drift‘ is a camera-flight through an infinite vertical tunnel, spiked with a lot of obstacles, all told via drawTriangles. In addition the cam is constantly rolling and rotating around the x/y-axes, which draws up a lot of interesting perspectives and views.

But that´s only a small proportion of the entire idee. Once finished I wanted to fill the whole scenery with sound and let the textures react on specific sound-peaks. Honestly, from my point of view, writing some nice little partly sound-reactive filters is where the fun starts! And I must say “Gee! The result. I like it a lot”- not only ´cause of the solid sound composition called ‘Overflow‘ made by Andre Michelle ( I´m quite sure some of you might now this guy ;) …) but in fact I added some kinda blooming chroma sound driven effects to the surfaces.

Well, the sound may take some time to load (~2.5 MB) but I think it pays…

Launch

Enjoy, and have a lazy week!

Posted in: Pixel Bender, Astro, Flash, Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /
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Well, after FOTB means, in my case, before WebTech Conference. Once again, I´ll speak about developing Filters- and Effects with Flash and of course Pixel Bender, which will be the last time I´ll give that talk because I´m already working on a new session topic!

But for those of you who can´t part with FOTB, here are a little more photos (via flickr) and also a little conference review I´ve written for Create or die:

• de-version
• en-version

Up next, WebTech, another chance to meet and have some nice times there.

See you!
 

Posted in: Pixel Bender, Flash, Actionscript3 by frank reitberger /
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