ricardocabellov5.5

Found an interesting video ob Bit-101 blog. As I also get that question many times. Well... as Keith said, here's the answer :)

Again, it can, and damn fast. Well, if it runs fast is all thanks to Román Cortés. which has done a magnificent job optimising the experiment.



If you want to know a little bit more about the details check Román's post.

Seems like using voxels is the best way to have highly detail 3D meshes rendered with Flash these days, although it also has it's limitations...

Ah!! Sources are available this time. (This time it's quite hard to understand tho ;P).

So, as posted, I was invited to do a speech at this year's pixel attack.

As the topic of my speech was mainly 3D works (with some exceptions) I've been working on during this year I though would be a good idea to do the slides in 3D and get some anaglyphic glasses for the audience. I found a shop with very good prices and in a week that problem was sorted.

This year's presentation system was a was a bit more complex than the one used at LFPUG :)

HOW TO USE:
Keyboard left-right: Prev / Next slide
Mouse left-right: Move camera left-right.
Mouse up-down: Move camera up-down.
Mouse wheel: Move camera forward-backwards.



So, the thing seemed to work pretty well, and the organisers did a great job making sure everyone could enjoy the effect moving tv signals around and giving glasses to everyone.



Some more (clickable) screengrabs :D





Unfortunately I ran out of time (better to run out of time than out of content tho) and I wasn't able to show the last slide. So here are some links to some of the experiments I wasn't able to show:

First a performance test of a 3D engine I was working on. In this test there are about 1000 balls with the depth of field effect. When I did the effect with Papervision3D long time ago I was able to put 200, although I'm sure it can be pretty much optimised too.



And then, something I wanted to try for a while. Andre Stubbe used to have a background on his site which looked similar to this. I though it was a render, but apparently was also real time (with Java). However, he sent me the sprite so I could try to achieve the same effect with flash.



And that's about it, many thanks to the organisers once again for doing a great job and keeping everyone happy, and hope they keep the vibe one more year! Which by the way, extra kudos for them as they probed that you don't need £500 tickets for doing these kind of events (the entrance was free).



On the pic (in a random order :D): Maria, Dave, Javier, Sole, Yingshun and myself

I'm sure you have heard of that radiohead's opensource music video by now, and if you consider yourself a proper geek you have also played around with the data. At first I wasn't too motivated on doing anything on it, but as I was playing around with voxels I wondered how would the data look like, so yeah, another geek for the bag.

Displaying the first frame was more or less easy, the biggest job on this is optimising the data to something easier to handle online. Each frame in the original data is 400kb, so I was quite happy when I managed to get it down to 30kb myself. Add it the 9kb of my (in the works) 3d engine, and you got a 39kb .swf:

HOW-TO USE:
Mouse left-right: Move camera left-right.
Mouse up-down: Move camera up-down.
Mouse wheel: Move camera forward-backwards.
(MaOS users: key up/key down)



Reducing the data in this case was basically converting all the float values to integers, and then just saving the deltas instead of the real values. This is, if you have (80,80,80), and the next points are (81,81,81), you only save the difference (1,1,1), that would then compress very well, specially because you will end up with a lot of 0s and 1s. Actually, if the value was 0, I would just delete it so I would save (2,,1). The code you need for reconstructing the data is very tiny so it's really worth the work :) Then I saved the whole thing as a string, and added in the actionscript code, flex did the rest when (zip) compressing the final .swf.

Having this done, I showed to some friends, and they were all asking "Doesn't it move?". Oh well... time for a long night ;) After a couple of tests and learning to use byteArrays and stuff like that I managed to have 1000 frames in 40Mb (zipped). Which is 10% of the original. At first I had them at 33Mb (in ASCII), but the process of reconstructing the data was too hard/slow for actionscript and also for the user's memory (1GB+), so the 40Mb option was the best. I'm sure Iq would've been able to reduce the 2000 frames to 5Mb, but well. (Kudos to him for sharing all these compressing tricks btw :D)

This is what I got in the end:

HOW-TO USE:
Same controls as before, but with an extra of patience :P



I also used in the experiment Fzip which did a great job.

I'm not sharing the sources on this one because I'm still working on that 3d engine and I'm still moving things around, but I should be able to release it (and many other tests) in a few weeks (yeah, I know I always say that). However, I can share the php script I did for parsing the frames.

EDIT: Wow, Aaron (the guy that did the original flash visualiser) wrote me asking if I was using shorts (numbers), and I wasn't, because I didn't know there was something smaller than Ints :$. So I've just changed the script to save the info using shorts and the zip now is 33Mb, so 7Mb reduction there :D I've also fixed a bug that sole spotted on the animator.

You may have seen this already, or maybe not. If you haven't, watch it.

Amazingly good. Square waves won't ever be the same...

http://www.mininova.org/tor/1419271

Well, seems like it can!



This is something I was testing some weeks ago while on holidays. I was testing some tricks to improve the speed of flash raster methods. While at it, I played around with the usual XOR code a bit but I wasn't getting much (~20fps at 512x256).

Weeks later, while having a nice coding session with Texel I found Forrest Briggs post about this same topic, applied everything together, and there we go, 1024x1024 at ~38fps.

The source code is very simple but if you want to take a look... here you have.

So... in short, never forget the BitmapData.lock() and BitmapData.unlock() methods, it gave a ~7 > ~38 fps increase.

I've been meaning to try NullDesign's 3D Engine for a while now, as it seemed simple and I was also looking for a lightweight (less than 10k) 3D lib. Although I had to slightly change the code of the renderer for this experiment, the engine seemed very intuitive and fast. Keep it up Lars!! ;)

Regarding the experiment itself, D///FEST is an event I'm organising with a couple of friends focused to the realtime art, that is demoscene, flash, processing, vvvv, open frameworks... and well, anything realtime. We don't have all the info ready, so, by now I wanted to have a holding page with a countdown experiment. Ended up doing a super minimal countdown clock.

You can get the sources of the experiment from the experiment itself.

I had to unlock my Sony Ericsson v630i recently because I needed to use a Spanish SIM and I didn't want to carry (care about) another phone.

On the net there are a lot of weird services where you send your IMEI and they give you the code to unblock it (NUC) for £60 or so. Same price they will charge on the streets.

Well, in the end, after googling a bit it was much more easier than that, and for free.

Just email them asking for your NUC code and they will give it to you the same day. This was the answer:

Good afternoon Ricardo,

Thanks for asking about the NUC for your pone.

I will assist you with the procedure ahead.

The NUC for your phone is ****************.

The procedure is given below:

1. Remove the Vodafone SIM from the handset. Replace the battery and switch on.
2. Move the jog dial left then press the * key twice and then move the jog dial left
3. Network appears on screen
4. Then select YES.
5. NCK will appear - key in NUC and Yes, phone should then be unlocked

...

Counldn't be easier. Seems like new vodafone uk contract phones are delievered open nowadays, so asking for the unlock code shouldn't be hard nowadays.

This is something that kept me a little bit busy these past days.



Had to do some organising (specially for the Data track) and all the menu design + cover. Luckily, sole was there to do the rest :) The end result is quite good I think.

This is how the DVD menu looks like:



I even did some ascii art for the thing ;P

        ________ _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ _______
       /    ___/     __/     __/    ___/      /       /    
    __/    __//__     /     /_/    __//       /   /   /__     
   / /_______/_______/_______/_______/__\____/___/___/  / .
  /      ________ _______ _______                      / .
 . /    /       /       /   ____/  // DVD #1 / 2008     /
. /____/   /   /   /   /   /   /_______________________/
      /_______/____\___\______/   v1.1

So, feel free to download the DVD, burn it, print the covers and show it to all your friends ;) Here is the .torrent you need.

And for all those that always want the sources to be released, even if it may sound weird for a DVD, yeah, we've released the sources, but you'll need to read the making of first in order to understand how it works.