ricardocabellov5.5

So, after being a week away of computers/internet, and having listened the track (which now is finished) a thousand of times and with the pad in front of me. The demo finally has a theme/topic that fits the music and effects available together quite well.

From now one is time to start working. Blackpawn is still working hard setting up the new version of DemoStudio (DemoStudio 2) for this demo. A workmate of Blackpawn is also helping with the 3D modelling for the demo.

We have come up with a couple of never-seen-before (we think) effects that can work really weel.

There is a lot to do and no much time available :S

Most of you probably know that I'm not really a fan of speaking in front of a group of people. However, Tink seemed quite interested and was asking me if I could do an speech in this month's LFPUG.

Right now I'm quite overbooked with 2 projects plus the day job, so I didn't have much time to prepare it, so I mention that to Carlos and since the beginning he was up for giving me a hand on it.

We still have to prepare the speech in detail but by now we know that it will be a getting started talk going from the basics and ending up understanding how my weird (for some people) experiments were done.

So... yeah, I'll see you there :)

While on holidays I woke up inspired one morning and having my ibook with me I decided to find the bug that made the pv3d previewer stop working on macOS. After a bit of testings here and there I found out that under macOS, the type parameter of a fileReference returns always undefined (while in Windows returns '.ASE', or '.DAE'...)

So in a couple of minutes I had a quick workaround for that:

function getFileType(file:String)
{
    _file = file.split('.');
    return '.'+_file[_file.length-1];
}

As simple as that... so now, with some minor amends, I've updated the little page and the 1.1 is out.



http://mrdoob.com/tools/pv3d_previewer/

Back from holidays... Menorca is alright, some photos would be up shortly. After checking all the emails, rss and news, the best that has happened while I was away is this:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

Testing it with my MacBook Pro... something that before this update was running at 11fps, now it runs a 30fps! :O It's really impressive. All my 3D experiments run much smoother now (specially the 3D webcam ones).

Keep it up flash player developers!

Some days ago, when I was about to create a new folder (right click) I saw the new briefcase option. It has probably been there for a long time but I never realised. I learnt a bit of what I was and ended up being something that I really needed, a sync tool between folders. However, seems that is a little bit dangerous. You can delete stuff easily from the original source. I googled a bit for other options, and I found SyncToy. Done by Microsoft. It's freeware, looks cool, and its easy to use.

And even when I though I wasn't going to do any more effect...

Refraction effect



http://mrdoob.com/lab/webcam/refract/01/

In Spain we used to have this kind of crystal in a very random places... kitchen, school...

One of the first jobs I did when I started as a freelancer went live today. Took 6 months to finally get online. That doesn't meant hat I spent 6months working on it, in fact I spent much less time on it.

My contribution to the site are just a couple of flash headers:

Home
It features quite a bit of oldschool key2key animation, and a lot of 3D to vector tricks for some effects.

About - An introduction
How to show a graph in a cool way? It mixes traditional animation with actionscript animation this time, at some point it was quite hard to control what was going on.

About - Why Traffic Broker
This one probably was the hardest one to develop and even being just a simple game. Whenever you put a highscores online, you know the work that it means. Let's see if someone beats me score :P

Clients - Our clients
Nice dynamic flash piece loading 100 logos on-the-fly. Developing this one was piece of cake thanks to Tweener.

Clients - Testimonials
This one is quite traditional, little slideshow between images. It's funny that sometimes it's better to go back to traditional animation using the keyframes, mainly for using flash player's progressive loading and avoid developing the code by yourself/load external files blah blah...

There may be some more pieces to be done for the site in the future, but at the moment that's all. Thanks to Neil and everyone at Traffic Broker for making this job THAT smooth.

Oh... inspiration... Today I had a bit and did some more tests with the webcam code I already had. So I came up with a bunch of new realtime webcam effects:

The Blender



http://mrdoob.com/lab/webcam/blender/01/

This one is well funny. I recommend you to stand in front of the camera, and rotate yourself (your head) by the Y axis. You won't see your head twist like that anywhere else.

Overexposed image



http://mrdoob.com/lab/webcam/overexpo/01/

The perfect effect for an instalation if you wanna organise a trendy digital art exhibition :D

Overexposed image + Abduction



http://mrdoob.com/lab/webcam/overexpo/02/

A modification of the previous effect with an abduction effect applied on top.

Broken Camera



http://mrdoob.com/lab/webcam/broken/01/

Weird random line delay. This effect used to happen with some old logitech webcams. Well, more or less ;)

Broken Camera 2 (new)



http://mrdoob.com/lab/webcam/broken/02/

Weird random square delay. Just a modification from the previous one. It's fun too.

...

And here is the bonus for the people that reached the end of this post. The first effect is by far the best one I got today, and you can do really nice distortions effect. Here are some examples:









:DD!

Some months ago I was quite frustrated with having to clean the comments in my blogs everyday because the spammers. I ended up getting rid of every form because that.

However I starting to thing about how to use that constant energy that those spammers were generating. With sole we came up with the idea of doing a website and invite all the spammers to write shit on it. Also, giving to the project a bit of utility we came up with the idea of having a map on the top to see where the map was coming from. The site right now doesn't have my super great design (which was very similar to those spam emails with alias fonts and ugly colours), but we wanted to put it out by now and see if the spammers 'contribute' to the project ;)

http://mapspam.net/

If you feel like helping the project to let the spammers hear about, feel free to digg this article ;)

Just as a quick note.. I updated a bit this weekend the extras section... A couple of movies added, and a new subsection with the usual software I install after installing Windows. The list is mainly for myself, so I have somewhere online a list to click through instead of having to remember the links for each app. Feel free to use it tho.