What I Do For A Living: TRONiverse

We recently launched a Flash app for the upcoming film TRON: Legacy:

TRONiverse

It pulls posts from Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr and displays them orbiting a 3D globe. You can click on the globe to find posts near that area. Post about TRON and your post might appear, too!

Also, we added a neat little Easter egg: click on the globe and then hold down the "M", "C", and "P" keys. (People who've seen the original film might have an idea what to expect....)

Phun Phylogenies

Pete Buchholz recently started compiling a phylogeny of edible plants, based on the APG III system. I ran it through Names on Nodes and produced a diagram:

(Unfortunately, this version strips out the clade labels—I'll try and rectify that at some point.)


When I saw this, I though, what a fantastic way to learn plant phylogeny! It's something I don't know much about (apart from basics, like the differerence between gymnosperms and angiosperms), and so I found it fascinating to see the ways the foods I eat are related to each other.


It's such a good idea, I couldn't resist doing another version for edible animals and fungi:

And this reminded me of another project I'd been meaning to start for a while, so I finally took a stab at it. A phylogeny of cartoon animals!

(That's right, there's a stuffed tiger clade.)

What I Do For a Living, Part 312: Dr. Facilier's Parlour

I recently completed a new application. This one is a collection of three games associated with Disney's upcoming animated film, The Princess and the Frog. This one requires a Facebook account: Dr. Facilier's Parlour. (Dr. Facilier is the villain of the movie.)

This is my first completed project using certain technologies:

• Facebook API
• Spark components (Flex 4 beta)
• Code Igniter PHP framework

Also see the Shadow Shakedown game therein for an example of how DisplacementMapFilter can be useful. (I also got to do a tiny bit of character animation there.)

I have to say I was very pleased with all of these new technologies. In particular, the Spark component set is a huge improvement over the previous Halo components. Skinning components is so easy now it's hard to imagine that it was ever difficult. Adobe has acted on the "Favor composition to inheritance" maxim, and it has paid off. Also, props to Code Igniter, with its flexible tools and strong emphasis on the MVC pattern, for making PHP development (something I had all but sworn off) actually kind of fun.

Enjoy!

'Nother Toolshop Animatic: The Head Map

I created a sort of "mashup" of the previous two and added a temporary music track. (The ultimate version will have something different.) Click on the thumbnail (might take a moment to load):


Still clunky, but I'm just fleshing out the ideas at this point. Enjoy!

March of Man: The Toolshop

My somewhat ambitious web app, March of Man, has not been proving too successful. The idea behind the project is to illustrate human and chimpanzee evolution using hundreds of figures. The web app includes tools for submitting images and generating collages. But there are only a couple dozen images right now. At this rate, the project will be completed by the time I am an old man. Time for a new approach!

I'm going to leave the site up as is, but I am also going to be working on a CG animation. I've made a new area of the website called "The Toolshop" where I'll be posting progress. Here are the first two mockups, using vector animation (click on the image to see the animation):

Human/chimpanzee evolution depicted as streams of bubbling heads.

The ranges of various taxa over time.

Enjoy!

Motion Blur

O.K., last one for the day—I promise.

I just committed a small addition to net.tmkeesey. As alluded to in my last post, it's motion blur. How easy is it to use? Here:

import net.tmkeesey.anim.effects.MotionBlur;
new MotionBlur(myDisplayObject);

Done. Now myDisplayObject will blur whenever you move it. It even works with preexisting filters. (Note that the blur looks best for horizontal and vertical motion, though. I may work on an improvement for that later.) There are also a few optional parameters: blurFactor (how much to blur per pixel moved), optimized (optimization flag—only uses powers of two for blurring if set to true the default), and quality (blur quality).

In the future I'd like to update this so that the parameters can be changed on the fly, but I'm not sure how useful that would really be. Good enough for now.

Once again, the code can be checked out from:
http://svn3.cvsdude.com/keesey/PROJECTS/tmkeesey/trunk