Flash

The other type uses scripts to do the drawing for you, something I like to call "kinetic drawing." In kinetic drawing, not only do the graphics themselves move, but you can also create the graphics in real time, and you might display the in...

Drawing filled rectangles with the Drawing API is relatively easy—you define four corner points and fill the area enclosed by them. Circles are more problematic. You either have to approximate the circle's curvature with multiple straight lin...

As with all creative output coming from a computer though, most of the artistic skill resides within the programmer rather than the machine. In generative art, the trick is to create substantially complete (but interchangeable) sections of a pi...

Throughout this book, I try to emphasize that you don't need to be an art expert or a music major to create compelling content. Here is a hack that artists and mathematicians alike can appreciate. It shows you how to create graphics that can ...

Like most graphics applications, Flash has a Paint Bucket tool that can fill an arbitrary area with a solid color or a gradient. Flash treats the fill as a separate entity from the shape's border (stroke). The Paint Bucket tool uses the fill ...

Escher's artwork. Repeating tiles need not be limited to simple geometric grids. This hack explores the principles of the divided plane to create complex interlocking tiles. Even if you're not familiar with M.C. Escher by name, you'll...

The MovieClip._alpha property is used to set and retrieve a movie clip's transparency. But Flash rounds the value internally, so you may get a different value when retrieving it than the last value set. In this hack, we store a custom alpha ...

Flash MX was the first version to support the ability to create a scripted mask, which is a mask applied dynamically at runtime with the MovieClip.setMask( ) method. Naturally, developers must be aware of how using scripted masks affects runt...

A series of circles interfering with themselves can create some really cool pattern effects, as shown in Figure 3-32. The effect is symmetrical in that either shape can be the mask. Figure 3-32. Interference patterns drawn with masks ...

Bitmaps are sometimes preferable to vectors, especially when you are trying to represent anything with texture (as opposed to areas of solid or near-solid colors, which are better represented with vector shapes only). A number of recent anima...

A bitmap can show complex textures but will have no sharp edge. Create the best of both vectors and bitmaps in Flash—a bitmap with a vector edge. For some images (particularly logos or other graphics that contain text or a "spiky" edge...

As with most extensive tools, you must learn a few tricks to overcome Flash Player's drawbacks. Bitmap shifting is one such drawback; it's a bug dating back to the earliest Flash Players and was corrected only recently—in Flash Player 7. ...

To be able to see how to create an effect simply by looking at the SWF online may seem like a dark art, but it can be done as long as you are looking out for the most common structures (rather like being able to replay a piece of music on a g...