ricardocabellov5.5

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.

Those ADs are cool, but they really mess the things up when they don't really talk about PC and Macs as a hardware, but about Windows and MacOS.

What happens if I use Windows in a Mac because I don't like MacOS (but I like the hardware)?

Whad I'm I there? a Mac or a PC? As I'm running Windows, I should be a PC... right?

And this is making the people speak wrong. The people ask me, what do you use? Mac or PC? I say Mac. Then they say, can you try this on Safari?

So, please, before you ask, think, don't follow the ADs. The question is, what do you use? MacOS or Windows? or Ubuntu? ;)

Right, a bit of an update... They have updated the site:

http://www.intel-demoscene.de/2007/flash/
'Press' will be always the same. Mistakes here and there, too many people to move the information 'mouth to mouth' I guess... The worst thing is that the video of Tokyo got desyncronised and I think they recompressed the .mpg video version that crest did that doesn't show properly the refractions of the balls.

Well, I'm used to this kind of things already, mistakes like that always happen and based on my experience about this... the best thing to do is ignore them :)

Regarding work done... not too much, at least not from my side tho. I've been testing some tools that blackpawn is developing but I'm not having much luck, they keep crashing for one reason or another. The music is already selected, so neurokin will be on the music side again :) We should start working this weekend a bit more seriously.

Took a while... but it's finally there. I still want to add some extra stuff to be completely happy with it (swfObject and swfAddress) but the base is done finally.

There are some bits of the making of that I wanted to mention...

As you will see there are a lot of images, so the first thing I wanted to do is optimise the loading of images as best as possible so there isn't too much bandwidth consumption for the iikki and neither for the user. I wanted to do a cache of each image, so the user doesn't have to load the same image twice if he goes back to a section he has been before. For doing this, I found the ImageLoader class from Zeh Fernando that helped a lot. This class creates a bitmapData with each image loaded, so if you have to load the same url again, it will check it and if it was loaded already it will reuse the bitmapData one. It also let me have the images with smooth = true, so every image, even the one in the background should look great ;)

While using the ImageLoader class I found the loadingQueue class which lets you create a list of stuff that needs to be loaded with a priority number. In instance, if you go to the print section, all the images will be loading with priority 3, but if you click in a project to see the details, those images will load with priority 1, so they won't have to wait until all the projects images are loaded to start loading. Just so you get it better, the big background image has priority 5. However, I found a 'bug' on this class and had to spend a bit of time understanding how it worked to fix it. If you deleted any of the containers in the queue list, the system stopped completely. I did an small fix and yesterday I sent it to Zeh, seems like he will update official class with the fix.

Talking about the background, the pixelled image is a 10x7 .gif image, it gets generated automatically with the CMS system using the php GD library when iikki uploads a new background image :) That reminds me, I also did the CMS for the site, and I think I finally got it to the point that it is really easy for me to reuse with any other project :) It's a shame I can't show this part of my work tho :P

And, as last thing to mention... as always, I really wanted to optimise the size of the .swf, in fact the original background for the videoplayer was something like 50kb when iikki sent it to me, I managed to get it down to 500bytes. But there was nothing I can do if the fonts that the site were using were THAT big. If the .swf is 160kb, I think 130kb are only for the fonts. Never did a site where the fonts took that much space :)

Anyway, seems like I'm finally getting some projects done. Now I just hope that iikki can use it for a long time :D

EDIT: Forgot to mention something funny. Although I have a MacBook Pro and a Dell Inspiron 6000, I had to do this site with my iBook g4 which made the process a little bit slow (but it was cool to make sure it would go fast on any computer). I had to use the IBook mainly because I have the mbp at work, and this site was a project done overtime, and because the fonts weren't rendering properly under Windows when compiled.

Dear Mr Miguel,

Thank you for your secure e-message dated 11.05.2007.

The reason you were unable to make a transfer on the 11th was due to the credit paid in on the 09.05.2007 containing a cheque which was not cleared. Therefore on the 11th the funds were not available.

As of today the 12.05.2007 the funds are now available to transfer. If paying in a cheque please be aware that it takes four working days to become available for interest and withdrawal purposes, however, a cheque can be returned unpaid at any time.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact us on ***** ******, which is available 24 hours a day, or via the secure
e-messaging system.

Yours sincerely,

****** M*******
Premier Associate

Seriously, HSBC internet banking rocks. I can pay any bill from there, and I can do any transferm. The interface works really well and I usually have no problems at all. And if I do, I can send an email from the system to ask for help and in the same day or the next day I got the answer. I only have to go to the bank if I have a cheque, but that's it... Oh, they got my surname wrong, but... who cares :)

Using BBVA internet banking is totally different, I'm losing my access to the system because I forget one of the multiple codes and imagine having to call from london to spain to resetup the password. Luckily I don't have to.

I was working on a project these days where I had to get a logo projected on a wall (3d illustration). Instead of asking the client to the logo I decided to try first looking on the internet, as the client/project name is quite famous it was easy to find something. So I had the logo in .SVG, cool! But I needed it on a big bitmap format. What was my surprise that Photoshop CS3 doesn't load .SVG files yet!

Oh well, then I remembered yomizmo talking very well of Inkscape. So, I downloaded it, installed it, no problems at all, and then did the easy task of loading an .SVG file and saving it again to .EPS, so I could load it with Photoshpo and create the big image. Everything worked really well. So, I'll keep it there, and see if I can avoid using Illustrator and using this opensource one instead :)