Depth of Field test

I want to start posting some of the little experiments I’ve been working on at work. I did an experiment trying to optimize depth of field rendering in FIVe3D. The way you can have 500 objects in 3D space with depth of field blur on all of them and still have decent performance is to use smoke and mirrors. Basically, the objects are not being blurred. Instead, before the program runs, it takes the Sprite or Bitmap that is to display, and draws it and saves it as a bitmap. Then, it applies a blur to it and redraws it, and saves it as another bitmap and stores it away, then blurs a little more and so on.  So, at the end, there’s an array with say 20 or so images with different states of blur on them. Then, based on the perspective of the objects, I find out their distance from the camera, and generated a value of how much to blur the object. But instead of blurring it, I just swap out the current bitmap with the applicable pre-blurred image. If you want to see some really cool depth of field stuff, check out some of the experiments by Mr. Doob.

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click and drag to rotate, mouse wheel zooms in/out

XM Wild Ride

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So I just finished my first project at Firstborn Multimedia – XM Wild Ride and is more of a game than a traditional site. The user is driving along in their new XM radio enabled car and you’ll drive though four cities based off of the many different genres XM satellite radio offers. During open road areas in between cities you can take exits to two minigames and a theater section, which unfortuanly only has one video as of now. The site uses the same engine that was used for the Zune Journey that Firstborn did last year.

My role on the project was development. I programed the ‘Help the Hippo’ game which is basically Frogger with a hippo. I also did the main drive experience, which involved taking the preexisting Zune scroller engine Mathieu created and repurposing and almost completely overhauling it.  This was the first thing I was assigned to pretty much from day one. I started by doing the game, but after finishing up the alpha pretty quickly I was switched to doing the drive. All the enviroment illustrations were provided to us but I arranged them for the enviroments. Mathieu Badimon was the lead developer and oversaw the entire development, as well as programmed the site shell and structure. Izaias Cavalcanti did the ‘Flip the Animals’ game and Max Holdaway did the theater section. Joon Park modeled the characters and fellow RIT New Media Designers Mike Kuzmich and Eric Eng did the animations. Will Russell and Wes Adams were the producers for the project. We also had some help with the animations and touch up work by some of our interns.

By the way, we hid a bunch of Easter eggs, which are invisible targets on select buildings. Here’s an example freebie – if you click mouth of the guy on the first bus stop, you’ll get a mini-map showing the position of the other cars that I used for debugging. (Also, while developing the project I discovered the site syncs well with the new album from The Dandy Warhols, specifically Love Song and Mis Amigos.)

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Anaglyphic 3D Rendering in FIVe3D

 So since Mathieu Badimon, creator of FIVe3D, sits right behind me at work and we’ve been working on a project together, I figured I should give his 3D engine a try. In case you aren’t familiar with it, FIVe3D is a light, simple, 3D emulator for Flash. However, don’t confuse it with PaperVision. If you want full modled polygons with textures, lighting, shadows – basically full 3D, then that is where PaperVision is your tool. But if you need simple 3D rendering, and you don’t want to import a million classes and compromise performance, then that’s where FIVe3D comes in to play. Mathieu does a pretty good job at showing off it’s uses on his LAB site.

So back to what I’ve been up to. I’ve always been interested in doing niffty 3D stuff with Flash, so getting into this was right up my ally. One of the first things I did was extend the engine to render stereographically, as where you would be wearing those old time 3D glasses with the two different color lenses. With the FIVe3D classes, I’ve extended the Scene3D class, so instead of Scene3D you use AnaglyphScene3D and it will display the result for use with 3D glasses. So anything done with FIVe3D can be dropped into it and it should work perfectly. It’s set up so the user can change the offset of the two perspectives, as well as show the original rendering. I still have to tweak the way it applies all three together as right now it blows out the original image’s colors. Keep in mind too that in order to get the stereographic effect, you need to render the scene twice, so if you’re showing the original image as well then you’re rendering 3 times, and that can make the performance take quite a hit.

Anyways, here are two examples of what I’ve done with it. This first test just shows a bunch of cubes in space, but it runs pretty smoothly, even on my old G4 PowerBook. This next test can be pretty heavy, so be prepared for a browser crash if your computer is weak of heart. This depth demo takes a grayscale image and converts it into points with a z-depth based off of the brightness value. I’ll do some more with it, and will probably post some more test within the next few weeks.

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Working at Firstborn in NYC

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It’s been some time since I’ve made a post. Back at the end of June I moved to Brooklyn and started work at Firstborn Multimedia as a Flash Developer. So far it’s been great, living in the city and working there. I have about an hour commute to work, but it’s really nothing. And Firstborn is a great company with some really cool people. You might know of Zeh Fernando of Tweener fame, he freelances for Firstborn but will be moving up here sometime next year I guess. Right now I’m working on a project with a bunch of people, one of them is Mathieu Badimon, the creator of FIVe3D. That project should be finished by the end of the month and I’ll definalty make a post when it’s live. Other than that, life is good. I live a block away from the best pizzeria in Brookyln, Di Fara Pizza, and believe me it’s worth the wait and the price. I also get to see a nice view of the financial district everyday from the subway when it goes over the bridge, including the Statue of Libery when it’s clear. I also noticed for the first time yesterday (after working there for over a month) that I can see the Empire State Building from the office.