Five Seconds of This Evening.

A (very) short segment of timelapse animation as the sun sets in Vancouver. A diptych of two angles shot from the same vantage point.

AS3 SharedObject

Looking into whether the flash player can set and retrieve cookies, I stumbled upon the ‘SharedObject’ – it’s like a cookie, but the flash player stores the information locally (and not in with the browser cookies). If you’re looking to set real cookies, try here. The shared object seems handy for a lot of things though, and it’s really simple to use:

package{

	import flash.net.SharedObject;

	public class shrObj extends Sprite{

		var nom:SharedObject; 

		public function shrObj():void{
			nom = SharedObject.getLocal("datas");
			nom.data.test = "hello world";

			getCookie();
		}

		public function getCookie(){
			trace("sharedObject is: "+nom.data.test);
		}
	}
}

I put together a test to see how it worked:

Enter text, click set, then refresh the page.  The content set into the shared object will persist.  Which could be handy for a bunch of things, no? Seems like storing the current state of a web app is a must in case the user accidently closes the tab or navigates away.

Source files for the example here: sharedObject.

San Francisco

Just back from a sunny few days in San Francisco, and have uploaded some photos of the city. There were more fisheye shots than I would have liked in my selection, but I am hugely impressed with the fisheye-hemi plugin for photoshop, which corrects the verticals in the image beautifully. It seems to have saved a lot of them from looking over the top, whilst preserving most of the 180° field of view.

Nikon D300s, Nikkor lenses: 10.5mm, 50mm and 18-70mm.
View the set (including full sized images) on flickr.

5×5

The 5×5 is an odd little thing that seems to have grown up on Vimeo in the last year or so. Five unrelated clips of five seconds, stuck back to back. It seems like a nice way to show clips which lack substantive content without giving the viewer too much time to tire of any one subject.

So, here’s a 5×5 shot along the Vancouver Seawall, testing out the D300s video. It was great to use, but a steadycam would be a handy asset for any moving shots.

Crowns

Royal.

Fractal Explorer

Having just started my first forays into Adobe’s Pixel Bender, I’ve been blown away by the scripts which are currently available for it. As a way to temporarily avoid actually learning the language, I spent quite a bit of time playing around with Subblue’s Fractal Exporter. Results below.

It’s particularly nice to see these shapes morph as the parameters change. Will get them into After Effects soon to render out these shifts.

Giant Green running.

Finished putting together a quick running test with the rabbit character posted yesterday.  This was a little tricky, as I’ve set up the limbs so they don’t deform.  The result is an odd bouncing gait, which could be cool with a bit or work.  Eventually, he’ll be composited over video of a city.  But not yet.  For now: running.

Jeremy, the Pan Britannica Bunny

Simple character design for a rabbit to be built in 3D and rendered as a shadeless, one-color animation.  It’d be fun to composite this style over video of cityscapes.  Might try out Blender’s new spline IK system to get the joints movements looking really fluid and curvy.

The pan britannica bunny

vector file: rabbit (pdf, 204KB)

Broken umbrellas

I’ve been meaning to post this set of photographs featuring broken umbrellas for a while.  Most, but not all, were taken in Glasgow.  There is, perhaps in that city more than others, a tendency to cast aside an umbrella with even the slightest fracture, presumably in frustration at the lack of protection it provides against driving rain.  I could go on about the form of the broken umbrella in contrast to it’s urban setting, but I won’t.

Vancouver seems like the perfect place to continue the collection.

Broken umbrella set: on flickr.

Organic glass city.

Well structured distopian vision, or lazy arbitrary render?  (It’s the second one).

Blender, Photoshop.

Full size: glasscity2.jpg