From the book I learned that the actual animal used for the model lived a sickly caged circus-type existence in New York City. Not exactly the symbol of adventure and wide-open prairies it evoked for me as a kid, but a perfect metaphor for the relationship bison had with North American settlers.

These are the output from a little Flash experiment.

There were 6 bays total and each one highlighted areas of cultural interest in the city. We installed 3 touchscreens behind a glass bay that included an interactive fireworks display and served as an information kiosk for activities available at the arch grounds.

Here is a video that shows a little bit of the preparation and the finished product. It was a really fun project!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Flash Heatmap

There are some really good Flex based examples out there, but I wanted a pure AS3 option. I found Michael VanDaniker’s examples the most beautiful and easy to understand. So I pulled out what I could to just AS3. I also got some help from sunild. I manually convert pixel to lat / lng coordinates on each map move. There is probably a more efficient way to do this. But I’m going to put to rest AGAIN, tinkering w/ math that is way over my head!

Did you ever notice that if you try to navigateToURL() from inside Flash in Safari it will refresh the Flash on the page? Here is a quick work around

You need to setup a JavaScript function that uses the DOM to fidget w/ the window.location.hash. It looks something like this;

function mapAnchor(anchor)
{
window.location.hash = anchor;
}

Then from ActionScript setup a navigateToURL() like this;

var _anchorlink:URLRequest = new URLRequest("javascript:mapAnchor('"+anchorname+"')");

where anchorname is your anchor.

So… I created a super-simple skinnable AS3 FLV player. It’s still got a few kinks, but might be a good starting point for anyone to add-on. Feel free to use as you see fit (pls don’t be a dick and try to go sell it somewhere).

Here is what it has:

• Play / Pause functionality
• Video Scrubbing
• Buffer display
• Jump To section

Here is what it does not have, but what could be extended w/ a little more effort:

• fullscreen
• time display
• sound controls

Link to AS3 Video Player Page
Download Assets

The twigs are all positioned and sized w/ code. The eggs shape was made by hand, but positioned w/ code. In the future I plan to further randomize the shape, color and characteristic of each twig.

Behold, my very first generative comp. The image of a neon hot pink, scribbled, slightly-rotated square popped into my head one day. Maybe I’ve been listening to too much Justice. Made w/ Actionscript 3 and the Bezier curve fitting function built into Tweener.

Fit my curve!

In the same masochistic way I let a ping-pong sorting algorithim rule my life, I’ve been obsessing on how to draw elegant fluid curves in AS3 via Flash’s drawing API. This mostly started from being inspired by Erik Natzke’s work.

I started with the Flash drawing APIs generic “CurveTo” method, but it left “kink”s in the curves that passed through more than 2 points. Then I played with AS3’s built-in “BezierSegment” in the fl.motion package which produces a cubic bezier, which are similar to the curves in Illustrator.

I scoured the interwebs for the best curve fitting functions. Dug through old presentations of Rober Penner, The Father of Curves in Flash. Most of the math is way over my head but I did come across a few interesting ones:

• http://mike.teczno.com/notes/splines.html (AS2);
• http://www.paultondeur.com/2008/03/09/drawing-a-cubic-bezier-curve-using-actionscript-3/
• http://erikloyer.com/index.php/blog/cardinal_splines_in_actionscript/

These helped me better understand the differnt kinds of curves but ultimately what I wanted was a nice bezier curve fitting function. I wanted to say, “Here are 20 points, class. Now plot me a beautiful bezier curve based on them!”… And it was right under my nose the whole time. Tweener, which I use every day, has a built in Bezier curve fitting function that I somehow overlooked. Yowza!

In typical jacobmake fashion, I’ve spent an exuberent amount of time researching process without a pixel to show for it. Hopefully, I be able to present some rough generative sketches soon now that I’ve licked this curve addiction.

Then I had a eureka moment.

“I’ll use the bitmapData class, blur me some bitmap data. Then I could loop through and select pixel groups by value and trace out the groups!”

Then I had another eureka moment. (Two in one day, it was amazing.)

“Someone already did this, it’s called Live Trace and it lives in Adobe Illustrator.”

So here is what I did. I took this image. Then I killed the saturation, blurred it out and tweaked the contrast to get this;

Then I ran it through Live Trace with a grayscale setting and colors set to about 25. And it came out looking a lot like a topo map.

I think I could still do something siimilar in AS with the Bitmap data class, and maybe I will just to prove it to myself I can.

I’ve been working how to get models from Google Sketchup to Papervision. They currently are working on Collada parsers specific to Sketchup. That should make textures a tad bit easier. Until then;

Here is a link to the source code and a working example.