It’s been a while since I posted anything up, but boy am I going to make up for that in spades. The following two animations are short Motion Graphics pieces Chris Petrillo and I did to show what it would be like to interact with our website. It is entirely pre-rendered, but we think it’s a damn close approximation of what using our site is going to feel and look like.

http://cias.rit.edu/~nmshowcase/QuasiComplete.mov
http://www.newmediaunderground.com/animatic.mov

And below I give you the beginnings of a working media viewer. When it’s done, it will be an Image Gallery, Video Player, and Web Launcher all rolled into one. I only have the Image Gallery portion working so far. More to come….

MediaPanePrototype

Here’s another animation that integrates dynamic content with a prerendered animation. This time we’re loading 15 images from XML and attaching them to the stage dynamically. The animation itself is also more complicated, dishing out 15 cards end-over-end while also having a smooth camera pan. The system is working, and running, great, and I should have a tutorial on how to accomplish this shortly.

Render Demo (Flash 9 Required)

Here’s a quick little demo that uses the DistortSprite class in AS3 to distort a dynamic image loaded through XML to match up in perspective to a pre-rendered, animated card.

PreRender Test (Flash 9 Required).

The basic concept here is that we have a prerendered animation from a 3D app, in this case Cinema 4D. And what we need to do is be able to dynamically attach images on top of that card in Flash. So we rendered out the animation from C4D without an image, and then motion tracked the 4 corners where the image would be placed in AfterEffects.

Then, by using Dr. Woohoo’s AE2Flash script, we were able to send that motion tracker data for the 4 corners out to an XML file. Since the dimensions of the Comp in After Effects are identical to the dimensions of the stage in Flash, the coordinates should line up. Then we simply run a DistortSprite class we have that just grabs 4 corners of a dynamic image and distorts them to those points that we calculated from the motion tracker. What we’re left with is the illusion of a dynamic image being transformed in 3D space along with our actual prerendered 3D scene.

Well, I finally got into AS3, and I must say, it is awesome. The learning curve is steep, especially if you’ve been doing AS2.0 for a while since a lot of little things have changed that will trip you up, but the benefits far outweight the negatives.

We’re doing our Senior Project in AS3.0 as a result, so I did a little test app to get started. It’s a pretty simple gallery, but it also incorporates deep linking, so browser buttons work and you can bookmark individual pages to go back to them later. Check it out…. (Flash 9 Player required)

http://www.jarringsenses.com/courses/nmtp/gallery