Max The Rocket

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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

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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.

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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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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!

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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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There are 2 secrets to get double click working in AS3. The first one is not really a secret if you read the documentation. The second one had me scratching my head for a few hours. So here they are:

1. set doubleClickEnabled to true


button.doubleClickEnabled = true;
button.addEventListener( MouseEvent.DOUBLE_CLICK, doubleClickHandler );


2. You must set the doubleClickEnabled to any MovieClips inside the Button/MovieClip listening for the double click event. If the MovieClip/Button contains only shapes or text that’s fine, the double click will work without the second step.

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