Eltima has released a free tool called SWF Live Preview. It enables you to see preview thumbnails of your SWF files inside of Windows explorer. This is a great timesaver since you don’t have to run every SWF file in a directory to find the one you want. Eltima makes a wide range of Flash-related tools and I will writing reviews of them in the coming weeks. But this is one free tool that will come in VERY handy.

Lee

Comments(25)

The folks at Big Spaceship have released an open source version of their internal Visualizer tool that they used to create the Nike Air site. Give it try and you will find that you can spend hours in here tweaking things! Thanks so much to Big Spaceship for sharing some of your expertise.

Lee

Comments(6)

So to continue on the topic of DistortImage, I built a tool that lets you drag the four corners of a photo and the setTransform() code is automatically generated for you. So all you need to do is find a good starting point and an end point and simply tween between the two to create a cool 3D animation.

Lee

Comments(17)

You can distort MovieClips in Flash 8 using the Matrix class. But this will only allow you to do skewing and not true 3D perspective. Well there is a great 3D Actionscript library called Sandy that allows for real 3D effects. One of the classes is called DistortImage and it does just what its name implies. You give it four points and it will strech and skew your MovieClip anyway you want. In the example below I used Fuse to animate those four points so the distortion is constantly moving. I also added a slider which controls the speed of the animation. This is cool stuff so be sure to check out Sandy! The AS code is also listed below.

[as]import flash.display.BitmapData;
import sandy.util.DistortImage;
import com.mosesSupposes.fuse.*;

ZigoEngine.register(Fuse, PennerEasing, FuseFMP);
var fakes:Array = new Array();

var sp:Number = 1;

for(var i=0;i<4;i++)
{
fakes.push(this.createEmptyMovieClip(“f”+i,i+10));
}

var bmd:BitmapData = new BitmapData(photo._width, photo._height);
var clip:MovieClip = this.createEmptyMovieClip(“holder”, 1);
var di:DistortImage = new DistortImage(clip, bmd, 5, 5);
di.texture.draw(photo);
di.setTransform(25,33,80,45,67,23,9,23);

function moveFakes():Void
{
for(var i=0;i<4;i++)
{
var f:Fuse = new Fuse();
f.push({target:this["f"+i],x:Math.random()*Stage.width, y:Math.random()*Stage.height, time:sp, ease:”linear”});
if(i == 0) f.push({func:moveFakes, scope:this});
f.start();
}
}

this.onEnterFrame = function()
{
di.setTransform(f0._x, f0._y, f1._x, f1._y, f2._x, f2._y, f3._x, f3._y);
di.texture.draw(photo);
}

moveFakes();

var sl:Object = new Object();
sl.onChange = function(ev)
{
_root.sp = ev.value;
}

speed.addListener(sl);[/as]

Lee

Comments(29)

My friend and fellow frog, Ben Honda-Rottler, has just started a new Flash-related blog at http://www.mediareason.com/blog/ . Ben has worked on some really cool projects and he has a lot insights to share as well as code examples. Be sure to stop by and check it out!

Lee

Comments(3)

So I have gotten a lot of requests to see the SWF files that Big Spaceship created for the Nike site. Below is a little viewer that lets you see them. Click on the image to see it.

Lee

Comments(15)

I found a nice photo of the tool that I tried to recreate in the last post. Upon closer inspection there tool has WAY more controls than mine. I’m going to expand mine to some more to add this additional functionality.

Lee

Comments(10)