Labs Jaap Kooiker AKA Flashcoders - Flash, Flex, AIR, IPhone

I wanted to combine the power of Cinema4D and Flash (in a relatively short period) and see what happens.

I started to create a simple 'lava planet' in Cinema4D, made a video of it and put it on the timeline in flash (I know on the timeline is not a best practice but it will do for now). Next I came up with a nice effect with dynamic particles and decided to get lava pouring out of the sphere.
What it does:
- Every frame
1. It creates a bitmap of the video.
2. It "reads" every pixel (of the bitmap) and looks for a specific color range.
3. When there's a pixel located, a new particle is added.
4. The particle starts to live its own life untill it reaches a specific y value and dies.
5. From all the particles one bitmap is created
6. Put some filters on the particles bitmap.
7. Place the particles bitmap on top of the video and your done.

This is one of the many products I've been working on in my spare -> spare -> spare time. It's done totally free because it's a local drumband wich can't afford my hourly rate at the time (oh yeah, and my mother and sister are members of the band :) ).
Anyway this site is in Dutch and has no translation at the time. But the main idea will get clear when you see it.

Because this is a site with no hard deadline or cost target, I could spend my time learning new stuff and try something (almost) new (for me).
I have used 3d max to make a 3D environment and render the whole. Oh my god...I didn't remember it was so complicated after the last - and only - time I used it four years ago.
Oh well... after a decade (it seemed like it) of tutorials and reading I started to make some 3D models and maps. The basic idea was to create some kind of an old hangar in wich the band does it's practicing. I do realize I'm no expert (and maybe never will be) but I think the end result is pretty good.
After creating the hangar and stuff inside I went and created some camera's and started to aminate the cam trough the hangar. This resulted in a flying cam from a fixed spot to the top of a specific bin and open the contents.
Making the camera go back after clicking home gives it some extra interactive feeling. One thing I intend to improve is when a bin is clicked and a book is showing, it needs to use all the screen width. This way (in case of large enough resolution) scrolling is not needed.

The final contents are not set yet... Let me know what you think of this beta release...

Edit:
Final Version : http://totallosameland.nl

Jaap Kooiker

Using the FLVPlayback component and streaming is great....if your using flash media server. But I wanted to test it with the open-source flash server red5, and that is a problem.

In order to use the FLVPlayback component with Flash Communication Server or Flash Media Server, you will need to update your server-side application script.

Apparently such a script is needed to create a SIML XML file wich contains the server location, application name, instance name and video files. Sometimes (like mine) you don't have the opportunity to place such a file on the target server.
I have read many posts here and there where people were asking themselves what they we're doing wrong, because the flash help exactly describes how to setup the component. Well, your not doing much wrong, it just fails to tell people the quote above.

So if your not using flash media server don't use the FLVPlayback component, instead use the video class (also shipped with flash) and pack this with your own player class. This way you can create your own NetConnection, NetStream and controls. The only downside is that it is far more work to create a simple FLV player.

Jaap Kooiker

Today a miracle has happened. I worked with a standard flash component namely, the FLVPlayer component in Flash Professional 8 and I must say I'm convinced!

In the past I never used the flash components from flash. Why? Because using the standard components resulted in large swf files, wich I don't want if it doesn't have to. So I write my own components from scratch, this works perfect for me because I could make them how I want in concept of design and functionality.
The way I see it, the flash components are a bit overdone. My custom made components result in much, much, smaller filesizes.

At the place where I work we created a class for use with the video_display, and used Read the rest of this entry »