Have three balls bouncing around the screen.

• There must be gravity
• The balls should bounce off the sides of the screen and back in
• The balls should bounce off each other

I’ve yet to hear back from them, so I decided to do a little bit more tweaking and post it up here. The different types of balls have slightly different properties such as bounciness, mass and size.

There’s some basic interactivity, allowing the balls to be picked up and dropped. This can cause a few problems when a ball is dropped in a position that intersects another ball, so I’ve still got a little bit bug-fixing to do but overall I’m happy with it.

Instructions

Move the mouse to the centre of the Flash movie and then move it around. That’s about it.

It’s scrappily written but if you want the source code it’s available on the next page.

I used BitmapData’s perlinNoise function to generate a grayscale image and played with the values until I found something useful. This image was merged with the flag to provide shading and then used as a displacement map for a DisplacementMapFilter applied to the shaded flag.

The effect was animated by changing the offsets of the Perlin noise, constantly increasing the x offset to provide the scrolling while using Sine waves on the y offset to simulate turbulence. Sine waves were also used to modulate the DisplacementMapFilter’s x and y displacement values to make the animation less uniform. The frame was then merged with the previous frame, to slightly soften the output.

I’m more satisfied with this result than my original attempt – it’s higher quality and renders faster. Although I pretty much had to disregard my previous work and it’s still a pretty useless effect, I’ve learnt more about some classes that’ll be useful when I come to look at particles and sprite rendering in games.

I wanted to replicate some of the effects seen in 8 and 16-bit video games, where sprites would be distorted to represent fire or water effects during battles in Pokémon or other RPGs. I figured that the simplest way would be to use sine waves to repositon rows or columns of pixels. Add a little animation and I came up with a basic flag ripple effect.

It’s a very rough and ready script and the output isn’t realistic but I’m going to look at using dynamic gradients and masking or the DisplacementMapFilter class to improve it. With the advent of Flash 10′s Pixel Bender Filters I’m guessing that scripting this kind of effect may become obsolete but as a means of teaching myself about writing BitmapData it’s pretty effective.

In case you’re wondering, the Flash movie above is an imitation of some of the fake advertising in the Starship Troopers series, using one of my photos from an Anonymous protest.

When I was in Brighton a few weeks back with boo we stumbled across a surreal scene in the town centre. In a small square two security guards kept watch over 4 massive letters spelling out “love”.

It was obvious something was taking place but noone in the small crowd seemed to know exactly what. Suddenly a lone little girl walked up to the one of the letters and started drawing on it. As a small group started pressing chalk and paintbrushes into the hands of children in the crowd, it became clear that this is what was intended.

The letters were soon swarmed by children, parents and passers-by wanting to make their mark using images or text. As the low-lying canvas within arms’ reach of most of the artists was quickly used up, some started climbing up the letters or each other to gain access to the areas left untouched.

I stupidly forgot to ask those giving out art supplies for any information and searching the Internet has been pretty fruitless – try searching for Brighton, love and graffiti and see how many results are returned. My best guess is that this was some kind of community art project as that was certainly the mood. The letters themselves felt uneven with several layers of paint so it might be a regular event. Interestingly, it was very civilised and people quickly fell into the “respect” mindset of the graffiti community, avoiding interfering with each others work.

The work may not have been as good technically as that at events like the Cans Festival but they both shared the excitement of the public altering their environment to their own desires. I just wish that there were more initiatives like this or a change to graffiti laws so that urban life would be much more colourful.

More photos on flickr
[flickr]tag:Brighton+LOVE@xerode(square)[/flickr]

I was in Brighton for most of the weekend and on Saturday I spent the afternoon running up and down the beach taking photos. I hit a bit of a creative block earlier while working on my site design and so decided to edit the best ones and get myself properly acquainted with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

When taking these photos I was primarily concentrating on colour, texture and composition rather than any particular subjects. I wanted to avoid the clichés of Brighton (such as the piers, or beaches in the winter, like empty deckchairs and abandoned promenades. For some of the photos I’ve tried taking eye-catching elements of the beach front and stripping them of their context, making ambiguous abstract forms like the one on the right or this “landscape”.

Editing these photos this morning was the first real time I’ve used Lightroom and I’ve got to say I’m impressed. The workflow is much nicer than my previous setup of Canon software for RAW processing and Photoshop for everything else. All the essential tools are contained within Lightroom and Photoshop compatibility means that any missing are just a few clicks away. I particularly like the cropping tool as it makes it so easy to use the Rule of Thirds and the colour/tone tools are divine. I was a little confused about how to export my photos without creating HTML/Flash galleries but Dan helpfully pointed me in the direction of the Export dialogue.

View the full set on flickr

A little Flash movie I threw together while experimenting with primitives and mouse-based camera controls in Papervision3D. I was also playing about with BitmapData – all the data is loaded from this image:

The whole thing took about an hour to put together and then around 30 minutes of playing with the animation in Tweener. This movie is my second experiment in Papervision3D and is a few months old now – I’ll be uploading some of my works that haven’t seen the light of day before as I finish off the design and flesh the content of this blog out slightly.

As I’m a little unhappy with the right hand side of this photo I wanted to go back and reshoot it. However, it has had a bit of attention since I first saw it – someone else had tagged near/over it, probably to try and claim it as theirs. 2 days later and as I was passing I’d noticed the entire of that wall had a fresh coat of paint. I both love and hate the transient nature of graffiti.

[flickr]photo:2779623254[/flickr]

Photography by myself, artwork by Mike Marcus