Hi! Welcome...

Max The Rocket My name is Max Rusan. I work with different kinds of digital media. I love learning and working with new technologies. It would take too long to describe all my skills so just have a look around my blog. Contact me: max at maxtherocket.com

10 November 2009 ~ 0 Comments

UNITY 2008

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This is the website for an annual 4D Events party at the Guvernment. This year I wanted to give the site a look and feel of love, happiness, and a little hippie. I used a lot of circular shapes, smooth curves and an explosion of vibrant colors. Doesn’t this website make you happy when you look at it? Doesn’t it scream Unity? Well it should.

I used Papervision 3D for the Unity logo at the top, it moves with your mouse :) . I thought the video on the background is a good way to show what the party is all about, which worked out well. Since the site if full page flash it was a quite challenge to figure out how to move all the elements on stage when the window gets resized, not to mention resizing the video. But I love challenges.

24 September 2009 ~ 0 Comments

Flickr Soundtrack featuring YouTube

Flickr-Soundtrack screenshot

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This is application that displays random, most interesting photos from Flickr. For each photo the application searches for a YouTube video that matches the photo’s tags and plays the sound from the YouTube video. Basically the application created a soundtrack for a photo being viewed.

I had to create a database of suitable photo tags for searching videos on YouTube. Most tags in Flickr photos are specific to photographs only like color, camera models and photography techniques. I had to hand-pick the tags that would be appropriate for YouTube video tags.

I created this app as a project for my application to Ryerson University. The interface is kinda weak, I was tight on time when I made it. I am planning on creating a cooler interface for this. Maybe something with 3d, a sound spectrum and an option to view the actual video that the sound is taken from.

23 September 2009 ~ 0 Comments

TSN Broadcast Museum

This is an interactive TSN Broadcast Museum exhibit for the Hockey Hall of Fame. The exhibit is on the history of TSN’s hockey broadcasting. The project combines video, audio and images in a 3D interface. I used Papervision3D for the 3D interface and coded everything in Actionscript 3. The exhibit is controller by gesture recondition. I didn’t have to implement the gesture recondition technology myself, it was already in place. i just had to work with basic mouse events. But the gesture recodnition system is just awesome.

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TSN Broadcast Museum

04 August 2009 ~ 0 Comments

CASA Lib: A Great Open Source AS3/AS2 Library

Here’s a pretty good description of CASA Lib from its website:

CASA Lib is a flexible ActionScript library designed to streamline common chores and act as a solid, reliable foundation for your projects. It provides a core set of classes, interfaces, and utilities to get you coding faster and more reliably without getting in the way.

If you work with actionscript YO MUST GET THIS LIBRARY! I ran into CASA Lib on he web a while ago and I can’t believe I used to work with actionscript without this library. CASA Lib has saved me a lot of time, it takes care of the code that you have to type over and over again like a zombie. Save yourself time and use CASA Lib!

I’m sure there are other actionscript libraries out there, if you know of any good ones like CASA Lib post them in the comments.

03 August 2009 ~ 0 Comments

Playing Around with Augmented Reality

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With all this augmented reality hype I decided to try it out by doing an experimental project. What I ended up building is was 6 3D cubes animated to music following the AR (Augmented Reality) marker in 3D world. You can view the project here but you will need to print out the marker (or go to http://maxtherocket.com/marker.png on your iPhone) and you also need a webcam. So once you print out the marker (cut out the marker so the paper doesn’t bend as much) point your webcam on the marker and launch the project. The music will start playing once the application can recognize the marker and the cubes will dance around in the 3D world.

For this project I’ve used the following AS3 libraries:
FLAR Toolkit
FLAR Manager
Papervision 3D

Download the source code for this project

08 June 2009 ~ 0 Comments

Wetbar Fridays

A promo flash page for a rooftop patio club downtown Toronto. I wanted to create an atmosphere of the patio at night through this flash site. I made a starry night sky with clouds floating around as the background for the site. There’s a guestlist form right on the page that uses flash remoting to add people to the guestlist. have a look:

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wetbar_fridays_shot_01

28 May 2009 ~ 0 Comments

Blackout 2007

A web site for an annual party at the Guvernment. The website was done in flash, AS2. It consists of “Blobs” that randomly morph and float around the screen, they pretty much have a life of their own. Each “Blob” represents a menu item. By clicking on a menu item a “Blob” expands to show the content. Give it a try.

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blackout_07_shot_01

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27 May 2009 ~ 0 Comments

Burn The Books 08

A website for an end-of-school party at The Guvernment. I had to program an animated flame in flash that used only one graphic to create a dynamic flame effect.

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btb08_shot_01

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27 May 2009 ~ 0 Comments

Revolution 2009

Another web site for 4D Events‘ annual all ages party at The Guvernment. The most challenging part of this website was to create a 3D ball, with reflections, rendered live inside flash.

View The Project

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I had to fake the ball reflections by making a enviromental map with the reflection and moving the dummy light used for the enviromental map. I did the background of the website in 3Ds Max, I got the idea from Eagle Eye movie, the room where the main computer was:

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27 May 2009 ~ 0 Comments

Ontario Craft Brewers – Caps Game

A flash based game created for the Ontario Craft Brewers. The game play consists of flicking 30 different beer caps into a beer glass. Each beer cap represents a different brewery, which is a part of the Ontario Craft Brewers association. Have fun!

Play The Game

ocb_caps_game_01

I coded the whole game in AS3. I used Papervision3D for the spinning beer caps, just for the spinning animation. I had to make my own “3d engine” for sizing down the beer caps when they “fly away” from you. I used Remoting to take care of the Leaderboard.

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