PaperMash

PaperMash

Here’s the first little tech demo of ’09 and I think it is a pretty cool one. The first difference is that it is made with Papervision3D instead of my usual engine choice of Away3D. It also uses a relativly new library, AS3DMod, and works with the 4 most popular engines.  Now this library is a modifier library which can do some really cool stuff, so go on over and check it out.

Now for the demo. It creates a standard plane, then applys a noise and perlin modifier to it. The last thing is to apply a FlatShadeMaterial to the plane and just animate these properties in the enter frame function.

You can download it here. To view the demo, click on the picture.

Harry.

Posted in 3D, Experimental, Flash | Tagged | 1 Comment

2009 – New beginnings.

New Years Resolution: Dream bigger, think bolder, work smarter, play harder, worry less, create MORE” – Eric Jordan,Twitter.

This twitter message caught my eye as it sums up every that I want to try and do in the new year. It’s even more of an inspiration as it comes from my biggest role model ;)  

2009

So, in this post, I thought I would sum up what I hope to achieve in 2009. Sorry, I haven’t posted in a while, I am back at school now, so not much time :( .

Aims:

Here are some of the projects that I want to complete this year. 
  • Complete the redesign of this blog in Flash
  • Finally get round to doing my portfolio/labs
  • Get as good at AE as I am at Flash. (No smart comments ;)
  • Improve my Matte Painting techniques. 
  • Get myself invited to more studios. He he :)  

So, there you go, there’s not that many aims, but I will probably get distracted by other things, I’m thinking iPhone dev here :) But being the future, we can only guess what happens this year. 

So, good luck this year, whether you are going to need it or not :)

Harry.


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Relix – The Remix.

Well, here’s another little demo that uses the Nano After Effects piece I created a while back, but sticks a preloader on it and some animation. Why am I posting this? Well, because it is fairly cool and I didn’t have much else to do :) . The technique behind this is having one SWF to load in the other SWF. Now this technique became a rather famous preloader technique when Web Designer (or was it .net ?) posted an article/posting on it and also that Lee Brimelow mentioned in one of his tutorials that he uses this technique.

preview

So there you go, not that exciting.

Harry.

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Plan, Prepare, Present. – The Planning Stage.

Well, the title is a little misleading. It’s not about a wonderful new presentation or a new technique, but a little saying I came up with to summarize my design/development process. Now, the next answer, what am I designing? I am rebuilding my blog in Flash as the front-end and keeping WordPress as the back-end. This is something I have been meaning to do, and as I told the guys at AKQA I was going to do it, I thought I might as well do it and get a major project in my portfolio :)

When researching the internet I found that one of the best ways to get data from WordPress, is to use the XMLRPC method. The actual implementation of this will come in another post, but thats the way I’m doing. I will also be using this set of classes for all the WordPress/SWF communication.

The Planning Process.

img_04401

I first started with a basic function diagram on the wall, in which I came up with 7 different files and listed all the functions within them. After that I fired up Microsoft Offive 2007 Visio and created a more complete diagram with function names and descriptions in them. Here’s the finished diagram in Visio.

functiondiagram

The main trouble I had with the design/plan process was that I kept thinking I was making the backend as well so I kept adding in things like ‘Add Post’ but obviously, as it’s just a template, it’s not needed ;) So there you can see what functionality will be in the template, but all implimented in Actionscript 3.0. This doesn’t include the transitions, layout and stuff like that, but that is all to come.

The whole process to me a few hours with gaps in between and a heavy dose of relaxing music. It’s not fully complete as it’s late (I’m writing this at 1am ;) ) so I need to properly check it and proof read it tomorrow. Please let me know if you see anything wrong with it let me know!

Before I crash out I thought I say a little about the title. Plan, Prepare, Present basically translate into Design/Visualize, Code It, Go Live. Now you have probably worked that out but I thought it was quite cool so, well, there you go!

Good Morning :) Harry.

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Merry Christmas & Goodbye to 2008.

Thinking about it, 2008 has been an amazing year, and probably the best of my life so far. The highlights include being invited up to AKQA, attending Away3D basic training techniques, and then being invited to FITC Amsterdam and given the chance to get up on stage as well! To sum it up it has been one damn cool and inspirational year, and for that I have a lot of people to thank for that.

But, there’s no good staying in the past, there’s no future in it. So on we go into 2009 and with any luck it will be even better than 2008. I’ve got one major project coming up which will be revealed in a future post, and in the wider community there have been some terrific advancements in the Flash world. My favorite has to be seeing Quake run in Flash (and now Doom 1 as well) but seeing CS4 released and the progress Adobe has made is brilliant.

Throughout the year I have seen and experinced what I want to do for the rest of my life, and I feel like the luckiest person in the world.

Thanks to all my readers for supporting this blog, and I can’t wait till 2009 to see what experinces and events it holds!

Merry Christmas,
-Harry Northover

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Northern Lights Design Studio.

No, this isn’t some amazing new studio nor is it my recently formed studio. It is a name I came up for while on the way home from London for my studio I am planning on setting up when I’m older :)

This post is all about my setup and what I’m designing on. I have been meaning to write this for a while and it gives a break to all those who need it from the usual tech demos that have plagued this blog for a while :) . Don’t worry, they will still be here.

Hardware.
My 'Studio'

So there you go, that is my setup complete with Christmas decorations, and now for the specs. *digs out manual* . What do you reckon, look like all the other professional design agencies? ;-)

  Dell XPS 710: Apple MacBook :
RAM: 4GB 2GB
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad @ 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.4 GHz
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX x2 (1GB Each) NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (256mb)
Sound: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Built In
Display: 26′ Dell, 17′ Dell 13.3″ MacBook Built In

Right now the hardware is out of the way here is a list of the software I’m currently running.

Dell XPS 710: Apple MacBook:
Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection CS4 Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection CS4
Sony Soundforge 9 iLife 08
Sony Acid Pro 7 TweetDeck
Maxon Cinema4D R11 Maxon Cinema4D R11
Autodesk Maya 2008 PLE Unity3D (Just a trial for the moment)
Adobe Flex Builder 3 Adobe Flex Builder 3
Processing 1.0 Processing 1.0

So there you go, the basics of my setup. If you want to know anything else please feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email.

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Nano – The Remix.

Nano

In my effort to learn After Effects CS4 and create high quality visual effects/motion graphics stuff, I created this little recreation of the famous iPod Nano advert to help me learn how to use After Effects and the Trapcode Particular.

Now this makes heavy use of Particular and uses the wiggle() function to create the random motion for a minute.

It’s fairly basic but it helped me learn the basics of camera movement and how to get to grips with animation in After Effects. There will hopefully be a lot more AE/VFX coming soon. I have a little Flash demo on the way, but after that it’s a free road!

Harry.

Posted in Experimental, Motion Graphics/VFX | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Euphoria – A Debut Song

euphoria_blog_picture

After a few hours of getting to know GarageBand on my new MacBook, this is what I came up with. It is called Euphoria and took me a couple of hours to make. It is a sort of trance/techno song and its 5:10 long. I have always wanted to make my own music and this is my first step into that area. It’s not perfect, but it got me going, so I hope it does the same to you ;)  

Euphore.mp3 (right click, save as)

Enjoy, and turn it up loud!

Harry.

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BitmapRenderSession Demo.

(Updated: Download Link Added)

Phew, a tech demo hasn’t found it’s way on here for quite a while! Here is one to let you know I’m back, but busy. 

I finally managed to get an idea down on to paper, (well.. into the Flash IDE) that had been buzzing around in my head for ages! 

There is a feature in Away3D call the BitmapRenderSession, and you assign this to the session variable of your View3D. What this tells the rendered to do is, instead of drawing directly to the screen, it draws everything inside a BitmapData object, but at a much smaller resolution. This Bitmap is then scaled up and show and the selected size. As you can imagine this saves a lot of work done, as you only have to draw at, say, a quarter of the resolution that you normally would. There is a catch. You will have figured this out already, but the lost of quality is tremendous the more you scale it up, but I have found out how to make this work for me. Just look at the demo. 

What I have done here is create a plane, added then some animation to it. Then I am assigning a new BitmapRenderSession object to the View3D, and then changing the value of it when the mouse moves. If you look closely at the code, you will see that I am creating a new BitmapRenderSession for every frame. Not efficient at all, but I haven’t had the time to look into this properly, so if anyone knows a solution, let me know! 

This at one end of the scale (with your mouse at the top), looks high quality, but when you move your mouse to the bottom, you can see the effect immediately. It becomes highly pixilated and, I think, fairly cool! I have seen this sort of effect on many sites, and always wondered how I could achieve it. Here is my solution, but one of many out there I’m sure. 

picture-2

Your going to have to resize your browser, as pop-ups seem to be fairly hard in WordPress :(  

You can download the whole thing over at my Google Code site (look on the right). It should be up there in a few days. Here’s the link: BMRS.zip

Harry.


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My new MacBook.

Hi!

It’s been quite a while since I wrote a post. This is mainly because I have been busy at school. The teachers seem to feel the need to give us an immensely hard time before christmas :)  

Anyway, as it was my birthday I managed to persuade my parents to get me the new MacBook. After playing around with it for a couple of hours I’m converted! I love the Macs. They are so much more cleaner and more satisfying to use. I still have my main workhorse as a Windows, which is a Dell XPS 710. 

There’s no need to post pictures as there are plently flooding the web already, but this means I can start experimenting with the iPhone SDK which is something I have wanted to do for a long time, seeing as I have the iPhone 3G. 

Finally, I will be trying to post some tech demos as there haven’t been any for a while :(

Harry.

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