BackSpaceStudios Blog

FITC Toronto 2008

Flash In The Can - Toronto 2008 is just around the corner!

This year at FITC Toronto 2008 members of PHUG will be presenting at the Seneca College table. Alongside with other Seneca projects, programs, and students, we will be exploring experiments in open source Flash. Our presentation will showcase the use of tools like Flash Develop, Papervision3D, and wiiFlash as both educational and professional.

We hope to follow this showcase up with a presentation at FlashInTO next month!

If you decide to go to the conference make sure to check out the official workshop on Papervision3D hosted by one of the core development team members, Ralph Hauwert.

Also make sure you attend the “3D in Flash: Now and in the future” session, which promises to become an interesting discussion between developers and Adobe!

Hope to see you all there…

Papervision Particles

A few weeks ago I started teaching basic papervision in my 4th semester Flash class (Digital Media Arts program @ Seneca College). So far we have covered basic class imports, setting up the scenes, viewports, render engines, and adding basic prims. However, students are always impatient to get to the fun stuff! So I decided to start taking a look at basic materials and shaders (Andy Zupko has a really good shader tutorial to get you started).

Getting a basic particle field to work in pv3 is dead simple. I did a bit of digging through the class structure and came across ParticleField.as. We start with the following two imports:

import org.papervision3d.materials.special.ParticleMaterial;

import org.papervision3d.objects.special.ParticleField;

We will then create a basic function to build our particle field:

private function createParticles():void

{

//Create a new particle material;var pm:ParticleMaterial = new ParticleMaterial(0xFFFFFF,1);

//Create a new particlefield.

var particleField:ParticleField = new ParticleField(pm, 2000, 5000, 5000, 5000);

scene.addChild(particleField);

}

Pretty easy eh!

View | Download Source

Playing with Papervision3D

The past few months have been tedious, to say the least, as I have been upgrading my AS3 skills and learning Flex 3 and Air development. As if this was not enough, In my research I have come across a lot of cool tools, libraries, class structures, and other various open source apps that I have been attempting to integrate into work…

You may have read my post, last month, on PHUG about Open Source Flash where I discussed Papervision3D and FlashDevelop, Recently have been spending more and more time outside the Flash IDE using FlashDevelop, and with great success so far I have no issues writing AS3 and using libraries like PV3 to develop….Ok, enough of the banter…So, for those of you who still have not yet heard of or played PV3, you are definitely missing out.

I can’t take all the credit for the code below, I learned a lot from Mr.doob, Lee Brimleow, lessrain, John Grden of RockonFlash, and of course Blitz!

Here are some very basic samples. In the first one I was testing using planes and mapping textures to the ground and the adding some random planes in the environment. I still need to add collision detection to these examples.

*Use these keys to move w = forward, s = backward, a = left, s = right

View | Download Source

In the second example I was testing how to load collada files.

*Use these keys to move w = forward, s = backward, a = left, s = right

View | Download Source

I will put together some tutorials soon.

Working for Lifecapture Interactive

As most of you may know the last few years at backspace have been busy. We have been working exclusively for Income Manager in the non-profit sector building their client pages. On top of all the work from Income Manager I have also been very busy teaching web development, design, and animation at Seneca College in the Digital Media Arts program. I have also been focusing my efforts on open source communities, while running PHUG - Open Source Culture, in order to promote education and awareness within the open source industry.

A few weeks ago I received a phone call from some DMA grads recommending me for a position as Flash TD at Lifecapture Interactive. I have to admit at first I was flattered, but not sure if I wanted to rejoin the ranks of the corporate world. That all changed…

I ended up taking the position with Lifecapture after realizing it was time for a change. The non-profit world has been good to me, but I miss big budget, high profile, high stress, and above pushing the boundaries of technology and thinking outside the norm in order invent and re-invent the industry, which is the true nature of Lifecapture’s philosophy and culture.

Since joining the team we have already embarked on a many new adventures and experiments in the ever changing Flash community. Stay tuned for some very cool work that will be sure to make the industry turn up side down…

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Hope to see you all there!