Category Archives: Work

Session at 360|flex Conference

Posted on by

For the past few days I’ve been in Indianapolis, USA, where the 360|flex conference was held. I was invited by the awesome people of Powerflasher to come and support Frank Müller in promoting the FDT coding solution. It’s been a fun few days and the weather was great as well, although I spent most time inside the conference center, where the airco was running overtime. Frank actually got a cold with 28ºC outside!

People close to me probably know I have a very strong opinion on live coding during conference talks, so it’s only ironic that my session today consisted of 95% live coding. But that went really well, and the latest FDT beta crunched every build flawlessly. I started out demonstrating the ways in which FDT helps the developer get rid of the standard small stuff, like creating classes, methods and variables, and finished with creating a little Indianapolis 500 racing simulation all in about 70 minutes.

Get Adobe Flash player

Here’s the result, use the arrow keys to drive the track, and correct, there is no collision detection. The *real* annual Indianapolis 500 race is this Sunday, but unfortunately we won’t be here to see it. We did go to the track after the conference today and rode one lap on it with our rental Toyota! That was pretty damn cool, I’ll tell ya! If I get to go to Indianapolis next time, I’m sure going to extend my stay to be able to attend the race.

Change of plans…

Posted on by
1

So there I am, minding my freelance business, and along comes a company that offers me a job. This happened a few times now since I left LBi, and while it feels very nice to be asked to come work somewhere, I just didn’t feel like swapping my newly acquired freedoms for yet another company. This last offer however, wasn’t just about doing the same work under a company flag. I was offered an awesome and challenging position at Media Republic… and I took it!

Starting april 1st I’ll be taking my bike to the Herengracht on a daily basis. How’s that for a change of plans?

My FDT Papervision3D workshop

Posted on by

Well that’s it, this year’s coolest conference in Amsterdam, FitC, is over again. Slowly the haze settles and life picks up where we left it the week before. But before I can actually sink into melancholy, my friends at FDT remind me of the next cool thing: My Papervision3D workshop in Krefeld, Germany, yay!

In case you noticed my name on the credit roll at Ralph Hauwert‘s workshop last week, I am not a member of the PV3D developer team and therefore my workshop follows a different strategy. Instead of creating or modifying the 3D framework I’ve been working on implementing it into numerous websites over the past two years. With every project there were new technological boundaries that were overcome by creative coding solutions or by changing the project contents altogether. It’s the insights gained in these processes that I’d like to share with the workshop’s attendees. Of course the basics of handling Papervision3d need to be covered first, for which I’ll take you into the only real software solution for developing ActionScript: Powerflasher’s FDT.

Papervision projects credited to LBi Lost Boys

Oh and in case you’re wondering, the workshop will be held in Germany and I will indeed be speaking German. I’ve had some practice with that in the past, so don’t worry: Ich spreche nicht so wie Rudi Carell!

Check out the signup page if you’re interested!

World of Fruit

Posted on by

From november to christmas, I’ve been working with the awesome people at NOISE here in Amsterdam. They developed a campaign called Wereld van Fruit (translates to “World of Fruit”) for Hero, one of the major suppliers of fruity beverages and snacks in the Netherlands.

Screenshot from www.wereldvanfruit.nl

In the attempt to promote Hero as all things fruity, NOISE came up with the idea of navigating the earth’s continents as you’re used to, with applications such as Google Earth, but with all countries being made up from the fruits they are known for.

On the top level, there should of course be the spinning globe, from where you can zoom into every continent. And although we’ve seen quite a few examples done in realtime 3D, this time Papervision3D or whatever other engine wouldn’t have cut it, since the amount of detail had to be a lot more convincing than what could have been done with smart texturing. Instead, there’s an impressive amount of alpha video’s for all things fruity.

It was really nice to see the world come to life from a flat, uninspiring sphere, to the tasty looking world of fruit it became in the end. Check it out at www.wereldvanfruit.nl. Thank you Niels, for getting me on the project. Thank you NOISE for a wonderful Christmas spirit, and thank you Suzanna, for having the greatest office dog in the world!

Bye bye Privacy, hello transparency!

Posted on by

I updated my homepage yesterday, from being very clean (read: empty) to being very efficient (read: a little less empty). It now sports a very flexible though completely design-less Google Calendar. With this, I’m giving up a considerate amount of privacy, but it’s all for the greater cause.

Since I went freelance last November I’m getting a comforting amount of calls for Flash projects, ranging from small and fast to long and hard. That’s a good thing for one, but I tend to get these calls a lot right when I’m waiting for a streetcar or taking a walke while out for lunch. Those are akward moments to start thinking about your planning, while you were actually thinking about what sandwich to choose.

Screenshot of the new google calendar

So now I can point the callers to my site, and have them put an option into the Google Calendar instantly. It’s still a test, but I have the feeling I’m going to like this feature. It’s also great for trafficers that want to be flexible in their planning.

Bye bye privacy!

Tilt-Shift effect in Papervision3D

Posted on by
1

About maybe a year ago a colleague of mine stumbled upon a flickr group that used camera’s with tilt-shift lenses to fake a “miniature look”. Next to having such a lens, this effect is pretty easy to fake in Photoshop, by appying a blur on a gradient selection. A little while later, via Keith Peter’s blog, I saw this video apply that same effect on video.


Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Don’t you just love that effect!? Now for a pet project site I was considering putting that tilt-shift effect on a Papervision scene. This kind of effect is pretty easy to set up, although CPU-processing can become quite intensive.

Tilt-Shift miniature effect in Papervision3D.

Maybe I’ll add some little details later, like little car-blocks driving around at the base of the buildings.