…back by popular demand!
The third session is booked for 28th-29th May and will be a good introduction to anyone wanting to create 3d in Flash. Covers Papervision and Away3d engines, including the new features recently released on both fronts, and some nice new demos too.
More details can be found on the LFPUG training page, and this time places are still available! Looking forward to it already.
There have been a few questions recently on both the Away3d and Papervision mailing lists about projecting textures, so i figured a demo was in order to help the explanation along, plus give me an excuse to play with caustic generators 
. This demo also uses Away3d’s tiling material feature to allow a seamless repeating lightmap to be projected onto the surface of an object.
As usual the source is available in the right click menu or directly from here. To run the code you’ll also need the 2.0.0 version of Away3d from the svn or the downloads section of the site. For now the shading isn’t entirely accurate, as the intensity of the lightmap does not vary with face normal. We’ll be having a look at the possibilities of achieving this, along with other texture projection techniques such as shadows, in the next major revision of Away3d.
The update is here! There has been a lot of activity around engine development, with my recent training class attendees getting a special pre-release 1.9.5 version that after further tweaking has now been launched to the wider world as Away3d 2.0.
full details of the update are present on the Away3d site. The demo we have here is a showcase of some of the new materials - a rehash of a slightly older version you may have seen last November… only this time, we have source code!
As usual, the latest source for the Away3d engine can be obtained from the svn repository or via the download page of Away3d.com. More demos with source code are on their way… 
Here’s a little teaser for the upcoming release of Away3d 1.9.5 - something I’ve spent too long tweaking and need to upload so that i can get on with some proper work! 
It’s my first attempt at an audio visualiser - i call it Supernova.
The rendering uses the new BitmapRenderSession class to be released with 1.9.5 that takes especially good care of filters, certainly there are a few in action here…
I’ve also included a fullscreen option that runs with accelerated bitmap scaling, just to see how it handles all those filters. Does a pretty decent job - hit return in the demo to see it for yourself (you will need the 9.0.115 revision of the Flash Player).
Next week I’ll be presenting the first of my 3d training sessions in London. The course is for two days and has already been filled, but for anyone who missed the original announcement on the LFPUG website, another session has been arranged for the 9th and 10th of April. More details can be found here. The course focuses on the basic issues and practicalities of 3d development in Flash, and will include examples written for both Papervision and Away3d engines. Hope to see you there!
Some interesting Snippets of information from Richard Galvin here - analysing some of the past enhancements that Flash CS3 gave us, and looking forward to reveal some of the features being worked on for CS4.
Added in CS3:
Being added in CS4:
Not much online info available on this one (hence the speculative logo…) - but i suppose you could always check Richard’s blog for news updates. Can’t wait to see what else they come up with!
Lee Brimlow stepped in to cover for Mike Downey on this one, who mysteriously had a prior engagement in Milan. I get that sometimes….
Essentially Lee’s notes of his earlier pres will do just as well for giving an overview of the AIR API - you can also find details of development requirements and examples on the Adobe website
An update for Flash CS3 gives you new options in the splash screen for an AIR application fla, and includes code hinting etc. for the new commands. CTRL enter runs a debug AIR application the same way a Flash project would run a debug swf.
‘Commands menu > AIR Application and Installer Settings’, gives you AIR export options (chrome, icon, digital signature, included files, file type settings for default opener), and
‘Commands menu > Create AIR file’, exports the application to an AIR file ready for deployment.
The new native classes for AIR can be found inside the flash.desktop. package. These include:
Andre Michelle could be credited with have The Best Job In Flash currently. His presentation was about how a simple hack in the Flash Player leads to hours of fun with oscillators, resonance filters, vocoders and, errr, vibrating balls…
The usual way of producing sound in flash is to load an mp3 into the flash.media.Sound object. However, this is boring! If you use flash.display.Loader with loadBytes(), a ByteArray object goes in, and a Sound object comes out. the sources for this trick (and more) are available at http://popforge.googlecode.com
For continuous sound, you need to make use of an Audio Cycle Buffer that splits bytes into arrays of 256 chunks (apparently this is the optimal number and gives a significant speed boost). Look inside the ‘Examples’ folder in the popforge svn to find a simple setups that create a 1 second sine wave, a continuous wave stream, flange effects etc.
Other projects using the Sound object hack include:
Hydra is the codename for the Adobe prerelease of the AIF Toolkit. In a nutshell, it’s a language-based image manipulation tool, the output of which can be used in After Effects and future versions of Flash (and possibly Photoshop as well). Joa Ebert is one of the few developers at Adobe Labs currently experimenting with the potential of Hydra, and his presentation was all about the vast potential Hydra offers, and the possibilities that lie ahead for it’s uses.
First of all a bit of background: a pixel is not a square! It is a piece of data whose values are interpolated when drawn to screen, and can carry various types of information like RGB, CMYK etc. Pixels shaders are programs to handle pixel interpolation (among other things) and are written in a shader language that is executed on the graphics hardware. Since this is executed on the GPU, it saves processing time on the CPU.
Hydra is a shader language very similar in syntax to GLSL - the shader language used for OpenGL shaders. The language is limited, strict and type-safe, so is a little harder than actionscript initially. Code compiled with the AIF toolkit will run in the preview window, but there is currently no version of the Flash player available to test Hydra code. It is also worth mentioning that there is currently limited language support for Hydra filters running in the alpha versions of Flash 10 (no loops, no if then else), but Adobe may be rectifying this.
Joa brought up some interesting theoretical scenarios for exploiting Hydra’s speed for serious performance gains in the next version of the Flash Player (most of the examples shown running in AIF were at over 1000 fps!) - but only if Adobe allow decent access to the hydra platform when running. Things like realtime physics, audio processing, 3d graphics etc. could all take advantage of the acceleration it would give, so if your interested in seeing such things in Flash 10, get on down to the Hydra Forum and make your feelings known!
More information on what is currently possible with Hydra can be seen by visiting Joa’s blog, or the Hydra Gallery at Adobe Labs
This presentation came with the opening caveat “Red5 is not just for flash video!” But possibly more importantly, Red5 is not just an open source version of FMS. While it’s true that it offers streaming media, live broadcast subscription, shared objects and application logic that is all possible in FMS, there is also Flash Remoting, life cycle data services, built-in Java frameworks, Ruby integration and Python integration on offer, with more features being added…
One of the major bonuses of the Red5 server being Java based is that it will run on any platform that supports Java, with a simple one click installation! There are great tools for development (like eclipse jdt), plus many varied libraries and already a lot of Java developers with the required knowledge to be developers for streaming services.
Find out more of how to setup a red5 server, create your own java extensions for custom functionality and run test applications in eclipse by going to Chris Allen’s blog
Also available to purchase is a new hosting service for red5 which you can find at http://www.red5server.com
And you can download the server itself (for free) by going to http://osflash.org/red5
