Read my lips: BeeZee!

Kind of a harsh title, but I found it fun. I often do, and people and don't. I guess it's my type of humor, I call it non-humor. Only few of my friends really get my jokes and I treasure them for that.

Back to blogging, it's been a while. As I feared, I would often lack the time to post because it's not in my list of priorities to be honest. I just do it whenever I feel like it, have something interesting to say, a computer with internet connection at my disposal and of course the time.

All the way from May I've been working on all sorts of interesting geeky projects( flash, as3, papervision, that kind of stuff ), but recently I've started to pay attention to my other need (drawing). I tend to be lazy, but I feel the urge to hold a balance between my geeky and my (wannabe) artistic side lately.

Long story short, I found a dead bee ( or wasp, not sure to be honest ) on the side of my window, so I've decided to spend some time to study it. I'm pretty proud of my eyesight and getting old is one of scariest things I can think of.

Here is the first drawing, a side-view:



I continued with a back-view:




This one has a a detailed wing on the bottom. It kept looking at the pattern for a while. I wonder what subdivision algorithm nature came came up with this time. I'll take the time to study that later on. It reminded me of Robert Hodgin's talk at Flash On The Beach last year and his butterflies. Check out this post here for more details.

Here's a not so impressive top view, I had weird angle for this one:



And as I usually keep what's best for last, here is a 2/3 view :



I wanted to keep these images as they were in my sketchbook, without major alterations or cleaning up so I could reference them later and make comparisons.

That made me feel a bit better, because last week I've been dipping my feet into too much 'geekery': a bit of maxscript, a bit of C ( I've compiled my Hello World gameboy advance rom ), a bit of Java and more processing.
I think I am the weirdest type of 'hybrid' when it comes to computers. I keep hearing that word in the flash community. I haven't seen that many flash designers that became developers and started learning Java, hopefully I'll be an interesting twist. I usually see Java developers learning Flex and actionscript, not even closely the other way around, but that's what makes it fun I guess. I know I will never be a great software engineer, building enterprise apps. with huge OLAP databases, because I know I don't want to become an engineer :) ( Not that's anything wrong with that, on the contrary, it's just something I'm not. I find it easier to figure out what/who am I by figuring out what I am not. )

Well, enough talk for now. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with something great next time. Enjoy.

Metamorphosis

I've been really busy lately and I hadn't had the time to post as much as I wanted to. I was revisiting a uni project in which I've used a figure:



I love working with vectors. I like crisp, clean, clear shapes. I like things that look cartoonish. Maybe I've been spending to much time flashing. Although I've used the figure in a Flash project, I started to play with the shape in Fireworks ( I find it faster than Photoshop for simple tasks, and I just wanted to quickly explore an idea ). I was using the Edit Multiple Frames function and notices that all the frames of the animation ( a figure raising arms ) composed into something that looked liked a winged man.



(Note to self: If you compress time in image recordings the static result is more interesting than a display of images in a liniar timeline. ) Entrapping a simple figure in time allowed me to toy with it and make it go through a process of metamorphosis.




I was intrigued by the forms created from positive and negative space, so I continued. With each iteration I developed the form into something recognizable. The objects chosen came to mind as I worked through the shape.



Since I've restricted to a couple of tones I thought I should restrict myself to a handful of tools in Fireworks, just the basics: select, copy, paste, scale and repeated the process. I've intentionally left the shades of gray to reveal the simple process.



Although I've been coding a lot lately, I can't really figure out why I've chosen this method. I guess it was the digital version of playing with paper cutouts: less time, less waste but less fun also I guess.



Repetitive patterns in nature draw my attention most of the time and I still regret not paying enough attention to my Maths classes in high-school ( I've promised myself to reserve some time for Maths as well ). The next step is most likely a series of experiments in Flash, but that might take a while, because the I've still got a lot of projects to finish.



to be continued...

Polylines

One day my mind was wondering and I found myself playing with the default screensavers in windows ( yes, I am a PC user :) ). I found one called Mystify, this one got my attention. I think the name the similar screensaver had in Norton Commander was better ( Moving Polygons that is ). I had to do it in Flash, and it was a simple fun task because I'm migrating to as3 and it's a bit tricky.

There are some basic controls:

> click - resets to a random number of points
> up,down keys - increase / descrease points
> q - toggle quality
> r - toggle random colours, f - toggle filter






Here are some screen grabs from while I was working on it:

















I'll upload the source code soon.

I've got a new toy: Arduino

I spent most of yesterday in London, visiting the National Gallery, the Tate Modern and just walking on foot a lot. In the evening I attended the London Flash Platform User Group Talks. This month it was all about Arduino.

"What is Arduino?

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. "

I've seen a demo by Alias Cummins using Flash to display information recieved from an Oyster Card. It was good enough for me to it working. Now I've got to make some time and read a lot technical documents on how to use it.

Except the official website :
http://tinker.it/
Alias also recomended this site:
http://arduino.cc/

Tink encouraged me to do something with this tool and show it back to the group. I already have an idea in mind. To a certain extent it relates to Tim Long's idea

And here's my new toy:



Pretty geeky isn't it ?
This will upgrade my status from the best programmer in the Fine Arts department :P

tube

I've recently returned from London. Another day spent walking all day and I was lucky enough to catch a great weather. I've promised myself to keep this post short, so here's the thing: I get all sort of random ideas when I'm away from the computer.
Here's an example:



From time to time there will be more of these 'random thoughts' posted.

Dithering in actionscript 3.0

I had to convert some images from color to monochrome while keeping as much detail as possible therefore I had to dither images.

The closest thing in as3 I found was this experiment on Sephiroth's website. You can read his blog entry here.

These are some pretty nice experiments, but not quite what I needed. So there was some research going on and the result is this:

Some of the algorithms were ported in as3 from pseudo code and explanations found in the following resources: this, this , this, this, this, and this

This port would not be possible without the help of Iulia Nastasoiu - Java developer, singer, dancer and ocasional philosopher and Teodor Stoenescu - programmer, drummer and general wise ass. Check out Pandrea for a heavy dose of 'mioritic metal'





I found the image in one of the sites listed above and I see it as a 'Hello World!' of the dithering algorithms

You can view code here


[EDIT]

Ralph Hauwert, a very important contributor to the Papervision3D project ( thank you for the cool materials and shaders ) has his own Dithering experiments.

There might be some confusion, so I'll try to break it down. I needed a monochrome dithered image resulting from any given image, so my version is thought for only one color. Ralph's version supports colour. For further info on his implementation I advise you to read his blog entry here

You can find his classes on Google Code

[/EDIT]

Particle Play

I had a bit of time to play with flintparticles.
I attended a lecture on flintparticles last week at the London Flash Platform User Group.
You can view the slides from the presentation here.

So here goes:


Weird Atom
view source



Liner
view source




Worm Hole
view source

Colin Moock's ActionScript 3.0:From The Ground Up Tour

Hello World!
This is the first post of this blog on ideas, random thoughts and other geeky stuff.

Recently I've attended Colin Moock's ActionScript 3.0 seminar. I've been delaying the moment until I'll migrate to as3 for some time, now it seems smooth. I was expecting to see Colin tired or bored by preaching this lecture again, in London this time. I couldn't tell actually, he was energic and kept us going.


If you're interested in the lecture, all the notes are posted here:

http://moock.org/lectures/groundUpAS3/

My version of the project can be found here.
The classes from the lecture are included and the ugly drawings as well.

Here's Stan:



If you are using Firefox and you have Flash Tracer installed you can view the traces of death :)
The Flash Tracer add-on is available here


There are more events coming up. Adobe is pretty determined to promote their new tehcnologies. Next Up: on AIR Tour . See you in London.



I almost forgot: I'm the proud owner this special Essential Actionscript 3.0 signed by Colin Moock himself.



This is added to the existing ones from:

Lee Brimelow




Keith Peters,
Brendan Dawes,
André Michelle,
Erik Natzke,
Carlos Ulloa,
Joey Lott,
Tink,
Seb Lee Delisle
and last but not least Aral Balkan