Time-lapse fun
Published by Ronny on April 7th, 2009 in Experiments, Tutorial. 6 comments . 584 viewsSome time ago I started looking into the wonderful world of ‘Time-lapse‘. I really found it intriguing and I wanted to do something like that myself. So I started experimenting around, and soon people asked me how I actually do this, so here goes…
Let me start with a disclaimer: I’m still experimenting to find the perfect workflow, and figure out a lot of stuff. If you got any suggestions to make: Don’t hold back 
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“World in Motion” Theme
Published by Ronny on April 4th, 2009 in Wordpress. 6 comments . 307 views
First off: Wow, it has been really quiet up here during the past weeks…School kept me pretty busy in the last couple of weeks. Tonight is actually the first night in weeks that I’ve spent working only on personal projects.
If you’re reading this, then you have undoubtedly noticed some changes on my blog (to all my fellow RSS readers: feel free to check out the site. It’s worth it 
). I created this theme myself, and to be honest: it’s my first real attempt at a Wordpress theme. I had to build a blog design for a school assignment, so I figured: “What the hell, let’s just create something cool!” and this is what I came up with.
I’ve tested it on the following browsers, and fixed most bugs and differences.
If I overlooked something anyway, feel free to tell me so.
And please: do tell me what you think of the theme. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!
Bezier animation fun!
Published by Ronny on March 3rd, 2009 in Actionscript, Experiments. 3 comments . 491 views Last week I went to FITC in Amsterdam. It was great! I had such a great time. I met a lot of intresting people and although Amsterdam turned out to be quite expensive place, I really liked being there a few days.During the conference I attended Joshua Davis‘ session which really inspired me. I’ve never seen Joshua Davis present, nor did I know his work. Let me be as crystal clear about this as I can be: The man is a freakin’ genius!
During his session he showed a few demo’s of bezier animated stuff. I felt like trying that myself, and this is what I came up with.
The basic concept is to create a bezier in Actionscript and animating movieclips using the bezier as its motion path.
))The following versions use the same concept as this one, except instead of fixed anchor points, they all use random points defined in 2 planes. This makes a bit of variety possible allthough the main animation stays the same and that’s absolutely cool!
I added a few keyboard controls to give you some control of what is happening
World360: Unbugged and kicking!
Published by Ronny on February 20th, 2009 in Actionscript, Experiments, Flash. 2 comments . 347 views A few days back, I posted the latest update on my World360 project (aka ‘stereographic projection‘… That’s what it is actually called). What this thing actually does is it turns a 360° panorama image into a stereographic projection. The idea is to render this real time (just for the fun of doing it) (I am thinking about doing more with this though…)
A few days back I ran into a (at that time) weird problem where transparency was rendered black after a few frames. I had a hard time figuring out what was going on, and I just didn’t have a clue where to start looking. Google wasn’t really helping me out either. So I posted my problem on FlashFocus but nobody came up with the answer to my problem. Peter Elst asked Ralph Hauwert if he already had run into this problem. Mario Klingemann suggested that there might be a problem with the premultiplied alpha. At that time I didn’t know what premultiplied alpha was and seen as the problem resembled the example Mario gave, it seemed quite obvious he was right.
So I took peace with this, and decided to fall back to a non-transparent image format like JPEG. 2 days later Erwin Verdonk came up with the answer to the whole problem… I just had a hard time understanding it…
The root of the problem was me: I had totally forgotten that the draw() method of the BitmapData class didn’t clear the pixels before drawing… Yea, that’s emberassing, right?
But okay… That took care of some problems. I rewrote some of the code, and adjusted some settings.
The speed and the result are quite okay right now. However using 450MB and up of RAM usage might be a bit of a killer.
I’m wondering if I could take care of this using PNGencoder or perhaps JPGencoder.
But for now I’m happy… The final result (for now) can be seen here.
Thanks everybody for helping me out. You guys rock!
PS: The picture used in this experiment was taken by Thomas Heylen. Thanks Thomas!
My FITC schedule
Published by Ronny on February 19th, 2009 in General. 3 comments . 364 views I’m attending FITC 09 in Amsterdam next monday. I thought it’d be good to start the day by making up my schedule for the conference.Monday
Tuesday
I really must admit, there were some hard choices… The FITC schedule is packed with intresting topics… I wonder if they’ll record the sessions and release them to the public afterwards.
If you happen to be going to one/some of the same sessions: feel free to let me know in the comments. I’d love to meet up!
