I quickly cobbled together this little demo using the new native 3D transforms in Flash 10. Alongside the regular transform.matrix property, DisplayObjects now have a transform.matrix3D property, which controls its appearance in 3-D space. It’s pretty easy to play with in Flash CS4, without any coding knowledge – I can’t wait to see a version of GTA built using this 🙂
Webcam controlled 3D Earth
Playing around some more with my webcam, I cooked up this 3D Earth with Papervision and made it controllable through a webcam (if you have one). The motion detection is rather flaky, since it tracks the centre-point of a whole area of motion – if you move a lot it will just get confused 🙂
When fonts attack
You know the drill… you open an FLA you’ve been given and it complains it’s missing several never-before-heard-of fonts that you can’t find anywhere. Wouldn’t life be easy if everything could just be Arial, for example. Try this little JSFL command I wrote (packaged as a ZIP, since it needs the dialog box XML file included) to change all textfields in an FLA to a given font name.
When design goes wrong
Nothing grounds my gears like tiny Flash fonts!
You know the situation: a designer has given you an FLA file to work from and either the text is too small to be legible for us mere mortals, or is going to be too wide when translated into Russian. Since designers rarely think of these things, I find myself either overriding text size dynamically, or using these couple of handy JSFL scripts that I wrote. One of them increases the point size of all text in an FLA, the other reduces it. You’re very welcome 🙂