Flash AIML TTS Chatbot – ‘HAL9000′ using PHP and Festival
16. October 2009 – 23:42
Ever dreamed of having a chat with you own personal AI?
Well, we are still a bit behind Arthur C. Clarke´s dream of a self-aware AI like the HAL9000 but with AIML, Festival and Flash you can build your own talking chatbot in no time.
Realtime SSAO with After Effects and Pixel Bender
5. October 2009 – 09:00
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion or SSAO is a method to compute an approximated AO pass in real-time!
This is done by using the depth information of a 3D object or scene that has been stored from the Z-(depth) buffer of the renderer.
Go ahead and try the interactive demo or see a video example!
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GPU based Raytracing with Pixel Bender and After Effects
27. September 2009 – 12:29
Since some years the idea of harnessing the power of modern graphic cards for 2D/3D applications has become more and more popular.
Today we find GPU support in many CG applications like Photoshop or After Effects.
But first the fun part: Watch a video raytraced with PB and AFX!
Strange Attractor Finder and C4D/PY4D Particle Bench
15. September 2009 – 16:52
Strange attractors are fractals that emerge at certain, sensitive parameters within the three-or more dimensional phase space.
They are are researched since the early 70s and strongly related to the chaos theory as they allow to watch the transition from chaos to order/geometry.
Good things first: see the result and try the chaotic attractor finder!
Smart Normal Map goes Silverlight
27. August 2009 – 11:00
Microsofts Silverlight has advanced to a level where it´s features and performance get contrastable with flash.
It took mere minutes to port Smart Normal from PixelBender (Hydra) to Silverlights shader Language HLSL (DirectX).
As with Astro, shaders are rendered via software – not the GPU.
The result is roughly comparable with this Flash demo of Smart Normal.
This was not intended to be a performance test but it clearly indicates that Silverlight isn´t inferior when it comes to video, shading or 2,5D.
Neuronal net vs. traveling salesman
12. August 2009 – 17:47
Did you ever need to figure out the shortest possible route between A and Z via B, C, D… ?
If so, you have faced the “traveling salesman” problem and touched the field of theoretical computer science.
The TOS is a optimization problem that is really hard to solve – in fact NP-hard.
This Kohonen Neuronal Network aproximates or ‘solves’ the TOS for 10 citys in about 1000 steps while ‘learning’ with each try.
See it in action or view a rendered image.
PY4D Boids
7. August 2009 – 19:17
Sebastian Rath´s PY4D is a new, alternative way to script with or to code plugins for Cinema4D – without COFFE or C++ – but in Python.
The current beta (v0.9.0001) already makes a fine impression and proves itself easy to get started with.
This video shows a little script that was adapted in a twinkling and controls the particles of a TP-Storm to behave after the three flocking boids rules.
Don has rendered a much prettyer version of the dummy above.
You can download the C4D-scene here.
Update: The file has been updated to work with the R12 version of Cinema 4D.
Pyramidial multiscale – 86400px gigapixel image
5. August 2009 – 11:13
Gigapixel images – it´s all about resolution and detail – one gigapixel equals a billion pixels so we are talking about tons of data.
To be able to view such a picture, it hast to be sliced into tiny little bites – otherwise it would kill any present personal computer.
That technique is called pyramidial imaging, multiscale or deep scale and works quite fluid with Flash.
Click here to view a 86400*43200px image of our “Blue Marble“.
The uncompressed sourcefile was over 10GB big and took nearly a day to interpolate and cut it into 9 zoomlevels existing of 80.000 tiles.
The viewer uses the fantastic OpenZoom-API.
Smart Tween – easing C4D XPresso node
23. July 2009 – 22:58
Since Rober Penner published the easing equations back in 2003, tweens have become very popular with flash workers and are taken for granted today.
But it has been brought to my attention that they are not that well known within 3D graphics applications – like C4D.
So Smart Tween was born – a C4D XPresso node that enables the animator to ease virtually any parameter or value with ten tween and four ramp types.
It features limited, delayed loops, pingpong and it previews the output curve.
Multiple object motion detection
24. May 2009 – 02:41
There are a bunch of motion detection and argumented reality experiments with flash out there – most involve a webcam and are able to track a moving area quite accurate.
I was curious if flash would be able to handle the task of tracking multiple objects/(blobs.
Take a look at the result and track some cars in the Czech Republic (live).
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Metabubbles
9. April 2009 – 21:01
This little 3D experiment is called Metabubbles as it´s behavior and look are quite similar to those of real metaballs.
In fact it is just PV3D ViewportLayers with the blend-mode “add” that produce those gooey effects when balls with a similar z-depth pass each other – “old school”.
The cpu-load is quite high but the result is as psychedelic and relaxing as watching a lava-lamp…
Smart Stats – realtime server monitoring with flash
5. March 2009 – 15:19
Ever wanted to keep an eye on your server without having to use the ssh terminal?
With Smart Stats you can – in realtime. It shows a live display of the most critical stats to monitor: cpu-load, memory consumption, top-processes, storage, network-traffic and active apache connections.
It exists of a very simple php-socketserver that executes tools like mpstat, top, iostat or netstat and wraps the output to something readable.
Have a look at the flashclient here or go ahead and download the package containing the sources and a readme.
Smart Normal goes Pixel Bender
22. February 2009 – 03:29
With CS4 Adobe introduced Pixel Bender to Flash, After FX and Photoshop. Pixel Bender allows to easily write and test filters witch are finally compiled to bytecode (Flash) or machine code (AFX).
For the new version of Smart Normal, its sobel-edge shader got portet to PB – making it blazing fast. Its even possible to use it for realtime shading.
Want to use Smart Normal directly within After Effects or Photoshop (CS4) ? Just grab it from Adobe Exchange and drag it into your plugin-directory.
(Photoshop needs the Pixel Bender Plugin).
Smart Outline – a C4D plugin
6. January 2009 – 12:30
Cinema 4D offers the function “create outline” to offset a spline as contour.
Sadly it is only accessible while editing a spline in pointmode- so it´s destructive.
Smart Outline offers the same functionality but is animateable, can exclude the sourcespline and works with all types of splineobjects.
Its available for R10 and higher – PC/MAC (supports 64bit) – …and it´s free!
Update: The new version 1.2 now also has an animateable chamfer- option
Asteroids 3D
29. November 2008 – 04:33
Once more a classic game gets revived with Papervision – Asteroids 3D.
Asteroids was one of the the first arcade shooters, developed 1979.
This version features dynamically generated asteroids (noise-displacement), “real” momentum and of course the famous hyperwarp.
As a decent 3D collision-detection drew to much performance, the game now uses dummy-objects and the simple and quick AABB-solution.
Try Asteroids 3D and blast some Asteroids!
Hint: Don´t forget your momentum when hyperwarping!
