SourceBinder » particle system

Refactoring and a little flint experiment

mind — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:03:51 +0000

Although it could look as there would be not to much happening with SourceBinder these days, but i can ensure you: we are heavily working to get SourceBinder into public beta for February. In case you have missed it: SourceBinder will be introduced in Amsterdam on the FITC. And i can tell you we have a long long way to go. Currently the whole source code is going through a refactoring which was already quite necessary since it evolved from a prototype which we made for the Flashconference last year. But refactoring is a good opportunity to re-think the whole environment with interaction design and simplicity kept in mind. Hopefully i can make a post soon on the new killer feature which is to simplify the quite difficult task of putting together compositions.

To keep you patient while waiting to lay hands on our shiny thing i made a composition public which i made using the cool Flint particle library and of course Papervision. Flint is really just ideal to be put into sourcebinder: there are so many classes to try out which a huge variety of settings. In this composition i made a little twist on a typical particle setup: the initial particle positions are derived from a DisplayObject3D-s vertex positions.

Spacetime composition

Click on the image to open the composition in preview mode.

This way any 3D object with accessible vertex information can be used. In this comp i used a torus to drive my little particles. To make a nice animation i used LFO nodes to create a constantly changing forcefield. Be sure to try different power and epsilon settings which affect the gravity field. If you happen to loose your particles you can replay the animation anytime with the restart button.

If you would like to explore the composition click here to open it in Sourcebinder. Don’t forget: you can also have a look at the sourcecode of the nodes by double clicking two times on them.

using a displayObject3D's vertex information..

Tie a knot on this one!

mind — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:28:49 +0000

Dear visitor, take this long chain made out of particles and try to tie a knot on it. The first who succeeds gets a free sourcebinder invitation immediately. Screen shots can be sent by email to our address.

The vertical mouse movement drives the amplitude of a low frequency oscillator (LFO) applied to the chain. The values coming from the LFO are used as an input for a queue wich defines the particle arrays particle position.

Particle chain

Particles and sound spectrum

sampi — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:43:56 +0000

Here are two creative compositions, that were made in collaboration by our very first sourcbinder alpha users. The first one uses PV3D particles and the bitmap effect layer to create a “3d-blurred” dizzy particle field. The second uses sound3d to play and transform mp3 sound in space and a sound spectrum node with a cube array to visualize the sound.

Dizzy Particles

Sound Spectrum Visualisation

First things to try – SourceBinder Xplore mode

sampi — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:33:51 +0000

While we are are still preparing for a public alpha we just decided to let our nice visitors also play with some composition. So we made an explore mode for SourceBinder which in fact is the environment but with only two features enabled: binding and adjusting. Be sure to doulbe click on one of the nodes in the compositions and try to play with the atribute values and of course watch the result in realtime.

Particles in a Sphere

Simple Earth