 Evolution of an Experiment: Circle Collision part 3Posted on July 15, 2009 by Grant SkinnerIn building the circular collision music visualizer which I blogged about yesterday, I became mildly obsessed with the lighting effects on the circles, which led to another short set of experiments. My first step was to simplify the music visualizer, so that I could focus just on the lighting. I wanted the lighting to be dynamic though, so I kept the light intensity keyed to music. I played around with a lot of different ideas for lighting effects, finally settling on a combination of a bevel filter, an inner drop shadow, and a stretched / rotated / blurred shadow sprite – all of which are affected differently by the intensity and distance to the light. I also added a radial gradient behind the light to make it more dramatic. The result was LightTest1. I also built a slight variation, LightTest1a, that modifies the intensity of the light based on its proximity to the cursor, so the user can control the brightness. Finally (thus far), I made the circles move based on the volume of the music, which created a somewhat hectic but mildly interesting visualizer in LightTest2. I’m not quite sure where I’m going to go with this from here. I’ll release some of the source code next week. I’m also planning to do a similar article(s) covering my recent sphere experiments at some point.
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14 Comments
Holy shit Grant! That's freaking awesome! How come you didn't use the drop shadow effect from lighttest1a on lighttest2. This is so impressive. I've only been flashing for a year now, and your work is laying down some benchmarks I'd like to achieve!
Posted by: Si Forster on Jul 15, 2009 4:05pm URL: http://siforster.net
lol, I love that album. Great spectral lighting effects!! Reminds me of the new Potter movie, in the dark cavern.
Posted by: leef on Jul 15, 2009 5:23pm URL: http://leefernandes.com
Cool. Thanks for this.
Posted by: esedeerre on Jul 16, 2009 4:07am URL: http://www.esedeerre.com
We actually used a similar lighting appraoch in a Zelda-style game we made for a client that gives a nice lighting effect (especially for a Flash game).
Tiny-screenshot: http://www.previews.nl/games/mtvne/anubis/anubisGlow.jpg
You can see this in action in the old demo (one year old, lacks most features):
http://cas.nickelodeon.nl/anubis/tombesvanapep/demo/index.html (around 8mb, dutch language)
(full-site: http://cas.nickelodeon.nl/anubis)
Posted by: Bart on Jul 17, 2009 2:07am
i love this new sphere... also could'nt you dynamicly generate audio with the collision of the balls in your LightTest2... this way it could be based on interaction as well as beat detection
i got something soon for all us as3 developers... its called lux and i hope everyone will join in the project.
ur a god keep at it
Posted by: cmoore on Jul 17, 2009 8:24am URL: http://nuigroup.com
Pretty sweet dude, I tried to make a sphere of particles in Flash recently, but gave up and did it in C++ so that I could get the performance that I really wanted. I'd like to see the particles on the sphere moving around and using the proximity manager you developer way back to light up or shoot off the spheres surface.
Posted by: Chris on Jul 17, 2009 3:04pm URL: http://www.somethingcolorful.com
That is very impressive! And very inspriring too :)
Posted by: dVyper on Jul 23, 2009 6:20am URL: http://fatal-exception.co.uk
Excellent , I love this visualizer and it performs really great. I'vs had a few dabs at trying to think up something creative with this as3 feature since the days of reading your first post on computeSpectrum but never got round to making something as cool as this ;) respect!
Posted by: ian pretorius on Jul 24, 2009 11:05am
Looks really, really nice! Great work!
Posted by: Kristofer on Jul 30, 2009 9:05am URL: http://blog.sommestad.net
pretty cool, some scrollbars effecting velocities etc. would be fun too, Have you considered implementing the z axis or a rotating camera, that would make for a spinney rhythmic flash-gasmic experience.
Posted by: Lee Waters on Aug 4, 2009 3:58am URL: http://illsci.com/blog
I've been trying to find this ever since your brief demo at Flashbelt. Can't wait to see some of the source on lights1 & 2 especially. Thanks
Posted by: Steve Kelly on Aug 18, 2009 8:13am
Wow, its a VERY cool visualizer, but i have a question, it might sound a littl stupid but, what song is that!!! it really rockz man xD, please, tell me, im interesting in finding more of this band, ty :)
Posted by: DooMMcQ on Sep 28, 2009 3:52pm URL: http://www.tuxtlamundi.com
Can you show us the source file of this incredible light =)?
Posted by: Krystian on Jan 6, 2010 6:52pm URL: http://www.linux.slupsk.pl
LightTest1a is nice.
the concept of lights in flash is itself pretty cool.
Posted by: AdityaGameProgrammer on Jan 13, 2010 8:08pm URL: http://www.adityagameprogrammer.com