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August 09, 2005
SWF cloudscape
SWF cloudscape: Nice animated example of using the Perlin Noise pixel-manipulation functions in Macromedia Flash Player 8... Ralph Hauwert generates the clouds and their shadows algorithmically, and then modifies them over time. The animation is slow and subtle, but if you don't see much change at first, try hitting "reload" to change the seed values. (What's "Perlin noise"? It's a way to generate randomness which is similar across scales, sort of like how the bumpiness of a large cloud is similar to the bumpiness of small parts of the cloud too -- makes for natural-looking phenomenon -- see Ken's page on the subject. These multiple fractal calculations for each pixel are quite computationally expensive, and we'll need to figure out acceptable levels of computational demands for acceptable framerates on various types of playback machines.) Other early examples of this pixel-level manipulation are from Flaver blog and Justin Everett-Church (hit the spacebar), and many of the effects at Franto blog.
Posted by John Dowdell at August 9, 2005 11:27 AM
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Comments
I tried to post this comment on this flaver blog - not working tho, so instead I post here.
hmm, how about using the displace filters and perlin noise landscape to deform a bitmap texture of real land?
also with the new bitmap functionality is there a way to use 'displacement' like images as a reference to effect dynamic positioning and movement of objects?
My thinking is along the lines of creating a game using these sorts of methods that actually realistically simulates the undulating terrain in the movement of characters as well as just the look of the terrain itself.
Posted by: Jon B at August 9, 2005 01:33 PM
JD:
Thanks for the recognition!
Jon:
Sorry about that - it seems there is a problem with the comment submission right now... =(
Regarding your comment, you actually touch on one of two things I had wanted to play with next for variations on that file:
1) Using the perlin noise for displacement mapping.
2) Using perlin noise on top of itself to create a bump-map with some generic phong.
Not sure if I could actually pull off 2 or not, but hey it may be worth a shot ;)
-Mike
Posted by: Mike J at August 9, 2005 05:44 PM