I have another simple but neat, little tutorial here on Flash CS3 filters. This time I’m not using Tweens at all. Our effect is going to use the MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE event to create the illusion of a light source coming from our cursor.
Above is a little example menu I made for a fake game called “Top Secret.” Don’t expect a game to start when you click on the Play button. Instead, when you click a button you will get a little menu to change the rollover effects of said button.
What I’m going to be talking about for the next… however long you read this, is how to recreate these cool effects for your own projects. Hopefully you will come up with some better ideas for using filters then just rollover effects.
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For any dynamic Flash project, XML will be a powerful tool. One of the most common examples (and one of the simplest) is a picture gallery like the one I have here:
Images came from http://www.stockvault.net/
I will be talking about how to use Flash and XML to make a simple, yet superfly, gallery.
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I have to get this out of the way, I am a huge fan of Wordpress. Both our blogs use Wordpress. Whenever I get a web design project, my first thought is, “How can I best utilize Wordpress for this project.” Granted, my second thought is frequently, “Maybe Wordpress isn’t the best solution for this [flash, static, e-commerce] site.” Be that as it may, Wordpress is still by far my favorite blogging platform. And it’s not just for blogging. With a few minor changes WP can become a truly powerful CMS as well. So if you’re looking for a free, powerful, and open platform with an insane developer community, look no further than your new best friend Wordpress.
This is the first in a series on turning the Default WP Theme into something wonderful. Today we’re going to go over the basic structure of a Wordpress Theme. I’m not going to go over the WP installation process, so check out the Wordpress 5 Minute Install if you need some help with that (if you are having any issues with the install, feel free to ask me).
By the way, we’ll be using Wordpress 2.5.1, the shiny new version of this beautiful platform.
Here’s a neat effect that I happened upon by accident. It’s a really simple Photoshop trick that results in a cool little watercolory smudge. Now you may be thinking, “You fool! Why bother with this? What could you even use this for?” The answer, my friend, is anything your heart desires. They make great ambient backgrounds, nice accents, and are just a fun thing to throw into your composition when you need a bit of subtle color.
Step 1:
The first step is creating a new layer with a transparent background and dragging a small radial gradient onto it. Make sure you don’t bring the gradient to the edge of your canvas, as you’ll have to stretch it in the next step.
I’ve talked about the basics of Box2DFlash v1.4.3 in my Introductory tutorial. I showed how to create your world and how to introduce simple bodies into that world. With the release of Box2DFlash v2.0.0 the basics remain mostly the same, there are a few details changed. I need to go over these small changes before I move on to the next step of adding joints and forces to the bodies.
The first and biggest change (although really a small thing) is that we no longer work in pixels! We now work in units that by default equal 30 pixels to 1 unit (think of it as meters; 30px : 1m). With this change our normal gravity is no longer (0, 300) but instead (1, 10). This makes more sense to me at least because gravity in reality is 9.81 m/s/s. This is going to effect almost everything you do, from applying forces to setting the width and height of a box.
