Last week I went to the Flash on the Beach conference and as has been said by many people, it was amazing.
I decided to go for more of the inspirational rather than technical sessions and saw some absolutely amazing speakers including (in order of appearance): Hoss Gifford, Joshua Davis, Brendan Dawes, Craig Swann, Mario Klingemann, Robert Hodgin, Erik Natzke, Chris Allen, Dr Woohoo, Andre Michelle, Marcos Weskamp and Jared Tarbell. Wow!
And as well as all these amazing talks there was the opportunity to meet loads of friends – old and new – and to chat about geeky stuff. And then there was all of the booze and the parties… And a girl in a box!
Anyway, one particular example from Robert got me thinking and wanting to play… He mentioned the PerlinNoise function and talked about how it could be used to simulate flocking. And he showed a slide where a perlin noise image had been used to set the rotation of a set of arrows displayed on top of it. I wanted to play with this and had a little bit of time over the weekend so I managed to come up with this:
It’s really simple stuff – you can get the sourcecode and see the process that it evolved through here. The code isn’t beautiful or optimised as I was trying to concentrate on playing rather than doing it right (a concept which seemed to be a recurring theme of the conference).
And I wasn’t the only one who got interested by Robert’s mention of perlin noise. Seb Lee-Delisle posted on Sunday about 3D Perlin Noise in Flash – it looks like a really interesting way to take this further. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with and hopefully to find some more time to play with it myself :)
6 Comments, Comment or Ping
Hey Kelvin,
Love the site! Nice to see you were also inspired by Hodgin's talk, I was there too that year and it was really interesting. He is doing some unbelievable stuff.
Love the tweetcoding you've been doing too :)
You've got another reader! Keep up the good work mate.
April 5th, 2009
Thanks Justin! I'm going to link to your perlin noise experiments from here too for people who come across my page:
http://blog.soulwire.co.uk/flash/actionscript-3/perlin-noise-flow-field/
I think your approach is closer to what Robert was talking about... I somehow missed the settings panel when I first looked at it and it's way cooler with it!
Cheers,
Kelvin :)
April 6th, 2009
Really nice experiments. I was looking for a method to draw marching ants and it appears you have the most efficient way.
If it is OK, I will give you full credit for a modified implementation of it.
CT
June 2nd, 2009
Hi CT,
Glad you like the experiments. By all means feel free to use my code however you like :)
June 5th, 2009
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