At Random we worked on a game for www.nederlandveilig.nl. The goal was to bring awareness to the 30 km/h and 50 km/h zones. We created a 3D environment with a unique style. By giving the player limited control of the vehicle, we forced the player to concentrate on maintaining the right speed and look out for obstacles on the road. If you want to experience the game for yourself, check it out here. Or watch the video below.
Finally had a moment to do my own stuff again. And since I like to play around with sound and visuals, this is the result! Be sure to close any other windows of your browser that have video or sound, otherwise it might not work.
Choosing the right platform, tool or engine is essential for the success of your project. Right now I’m working on a 3D game, so naturally I thought of using Papervision3D because I’m familiar with it. Our game however, relies heavily on collision detection and fast rendering, and both are done better by the Alternativa3D engine. The only thing that is missing is any form of lighting the 3D objects dynamically.
We need to dynamically add shadows on our models because baking textures by using 3D studio max is not an option, but the Alternativa platform does not support it (yet). So I had to add it myself. The only problem is that the engine is not open source. I asked if I could get it, but they didn’t give it to me. So I had to decompile the engine first, which presented problem number two: decompiled source code contains lots of errors.
It took me 1 day to fix the source code, and then another day of optimizing the code for Flash player 10. After that was done, adding the flat shading was done in less then an hour. I added flat shading for TextureMaterial and MovieClipMaterial, which are lighted only the first time their surfaces are created. But the FillMaterial has dynamic lighting (only ambient).
Check out the demo here. Click the color pallet to change the color of the light and see how it affects the color of the surfaces of the spheres.
My first month as a partner at Random is over and my first project is finished. We had to make a campaign website for the Philips MSS shaver. The idea was to use your webcam and a face recognition algorithm to “scan” your face so the shaver could attach itself to your face. Shaving your face also triggers panels on the right side to explain the unique features of the shaver. People without a webcam can shave the face of a model instead. Check out the website over here, or watch the video below.
I had this idea to let the Math.random() function generate paths in flash. What does it look like? Like this. The algorithm is really simple (as usual):
Today I had some time to do some experimenting again. In the Placebo project I used 2D inverse kinematics on the octopus tentacles, so when that project was finished I was curious how that would work in 3D. Turns out not much different then the 2D version. Check out the result over here. I also added a drawing function to the experiment, just click the mouse on the canvas to turn drawing on and off and create your own artwork.
Yesterday, a new website I’ve been working on with the guys from Random went live. It is the portfolio site for the modeling, photographer and stylist agency House of orange. For this site I created the architecture and data communication, as well as the menu and the collage view (e.g. the landing page). An extensive CMS is backing up the website for easy maintenance. Users can add their favorite images to a lightbox after which the lightbox can be downloaded onto their computer. You can check the website here.
Check out the video below for a recorded example of the website.
About two months ago, Champagne Valentine won a pitch to make the video clip for the song “The Never-Ending why” from Placebo. In addition to that video clip they also wanted to create an interactive video clip. Random teamed up with them and with lots of hard work from lots of talented people the result ended up to be awesome. To check out the original video clip, click here. To check out the interactive video clip, click here.
The cool thing about the project was that lots of Flash animation and scripted animations are use in the normal video clip, for which we had to create tools to record the motion first, and later render it out frame by frame in flash. The animations I worked on (both linear and interactive) are the squid scene and the tunnel scenes.
This afternoon I was in a designer furniture shop in Amsterdam. While I was there I spotted a carpet which was made up out of lines of fabric (check the image below).
This gave me the idea of doing something similar with code. It ended up being a pretty simple thing to do. You just need to start out with a basic shape, then you need to draw that shape onto a bitmap. The next step is to apply a glow filter with a specific color, and repeat this over and over again with different colors. You can try it out yourself over here. The result may end up something like this…
It is still work in progress, but I couldn’t keep this for myself. Based on perlin noise using the brightness of pixels (again) to push up each line of the wave, drawing the layers from back to front and giving them a different color. When you move the mouse left, right, up and down you will influence the perlin noise bitmap, which affects the waves. Try it out here.
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