Spice up your postcard 3D with environment mapping

Since Flash Player 10 introduced native 3D functionality, the world of “postcard 3D” rejoiced as doing simple 3D tasks became much easier… Just as long as it did not involve z-sorting or shading effects. The z-sorting has been tackled before, and here’s an attempt at implementing the second idea. Partly out of boredom and partly…

3D smoke: taking Pixel Bender to the next dimension

One final thing I wanted to achieve with smoke effects is to port the 2D simulation to 3D. Early results in pure AS3 were pretty disappointing, so again I turned to Pixel Bender and its speedy goodness. Still, the main obstacle was of course performance. The first step was to optimize the original 2D version…

Verlet + Newton + FP10 = Cloth Simulation

A project I’m currently involved in inspired me to completely rewrite my old Curtain class into something more stable and versatile. Using a character physics method based on Verlet integration, and adding some properties for friction and gravity, it resulted in a 2D cloth simulation (at least after some updates I just did since I needed…

Flash watercolour simulation (using PixelBender)

Something I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time is imitating real artistic media, in particular watercolours. Not because I’m an avid watercolour painter (last time I’ve touched them was in kindergarten), but because I think it’s an interesting dynamic. Since it is mainly fluid dynamics, the idea resurfaced after my previous fluid sims.…