visualplayground

Lasker, Central Park, NYC, originally uploaded by schibbi.

Shot during a nice and relaxing bikre ride through central park on August 16th, 2009. Note to myself: Bring a lock for the locker next time!

http://www.centralpark.com/pages/attractions/lasker-pool-rink.html

We went to the FITC conference in Toronto last week and had a blast. There was a good vibe all around and we had a lot of fun. To pass along all the good stuff we saw we generated a big FITC link dump featuring links to speakers, presentations and presented work we liked.
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TheCoronaBeach.com has been named again as a finalist in the Beverages category of the New York Festivals Innovative Advertising Awards competition. Corona is also an FITC finalist in the Flash Visual Design category, in addition to Quantum of Solace in the Flash Games Category. Please vote: People’s Choice Award

I am happy to announce that TheCoronaBeach.com, my first site that I worked on at Big Spaceship is now a finalist for this years Flash In The Can Awards.

It was challenging to creating one big 3d environment that includes a lot of interactive objects, integrates seemlessly with other parts of the site and still provides a fluid user experience and broadcast quality imagery throughout the whole website. We used Papervision3D to create the enormous beach environment in which you can pan left/right/up/down. The background is a huge texture mapped on a custom sphere, created in cinema4d and converted into a collada file with the help of blender. The key was to add the (interactive) objects partly within the pv3d scene, partly as a normal 2d-movieclip on a new layer on top of it. For every 2D-Movieclip we added a new DisplayObject3D to the scene whose screen-x/y/z position is used to change the position and scale of the 2d-Movieclip.
So all the 3d movement could be easily controlled within papervision3d.

Most complicated features:
Integration of a huge wave/shore-video that completely runs within papervision and doesn’t kill the framerate of the site. Dragging down the sun to change the environment into a night scene. Draw into the Sand!

Go explore the Site and please vote here if you like it.
thanks.

I just burned my blog-feed at feedburner.com. Looking forward to see how this is all working.

The new feed address is :: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/vpg

Recently i started to code a lot more php/html/css. So i finally installed xampp/mamp on my local machine and created Aliases that directly point to the current project folder which makes it a lot easier to test.

To create an Alias just add following code into the httpd.conf file:

Alias /myAlias /Users/username/folder/deploy
<Directory "/Users/username/folder/deploy">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI Includes
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

After restarting your apache server the alias should work right away. In our example it would be http://localhost/myAlias.

Instead of just adding those lines to the httpd.conf file you can also easily manage your aliases in external files. Save the above code in a new textfile (e.g. myAlias.conf) and include your alias-folder-path in the httpd.conf file by adding following code to it.

<IfModule mod_alias.c>
	Include /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/alias
</IfModule>

Make sure that your folder path is set right. From now on you can just add aliases to that folder. nice and handy.

“Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!”

Yay. A new blog is up and running. All previous attempts to run a blog kind of failed. I think mostly because i spent a lot of time testing plug ins and templating but never really blogged a lot. This time I’m gonna try the other way around. Start blogging first and figure out cool plug ins and designs on the fly. So be prepared to see the standard theme for a long time, haha.

I want to use this blog to create a collection of thinks i like and are helpful in my daily job as a creative developer. Quality is a lot more important than quantity so don’t expect a lot but good things.

We were curious if we could run a simple test that quickly compares the new Flash10 3D capabilities and Papervision3D.

We are totally aware of the fact that Flash 3D and all other 3D engines like Papervision3D or Away3D are very different approaches.
The Question is more: Flash10 3D or Papervision3D for simple 3D features on a site?

Our quick and dirty test is to create 1000 rectangles, randomly place them in 3D space, animate it a bit and see what is faster.

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Here are the Big Spaceship slides from Zanders and Daniels Session at MAX :: The Making of the MAX 2008 Website (20mb).

We used the new Acrobat 9 to create the presentation. An amazing new feature is that you can directly import SWF Files into a page, so all dev examples are fully interactive. Make sure that you have the latest Acrobat reader to view it.

The PDF shows a lot of the design and development process and is pretty much self explanatory. I left a comment on the slides that have additional interactive features.

Have fun.

We often have the problem of sequencing animations and events, e.g. 1. close all windows, 2. move somewhere else, 3. open windows.

To make our lives a little bit easier I was looking for a simple class that we can use to sequence those tasks. I looked around but couldn’t find anything that was small, simple to fit our needs. So I wrote one called SimpleSequencer.

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