At FOTB Brighton I presented on our process for developing the Fairies and Dragons Happy Meal toys. One of the things I showed was how we took a png sequence exported from Maya and cropped them to reduce the amount of alpha. To do that I built a WPF application in C# that would look at a folder and read in every png that was in there. For every image the application runs through each pixel and tries to determine all of the unnecessary alpha and crops it. The cool thing is that when the file gets saved out again it saves it with the x,y offset in the filename so that we can use a JSFL script to import all the images so the animation lines up.

Here is an example. Note : Everything in red is actually alpha I just filled it in for demonstration purposes.

First select a input folder. This folder would have all of your images are in. Make sure the images are named sequentially.
Next select a output folder. It’s best if this folder is empty as this will be the folder where all of the cropped images will be placed.

Here is a sample of the original image named Animation_Test.1.jpg.

Here is the cropped image with the new name Animation_Test.1._163_95.jpg
As you can see it appends the x,y offset to the end of the filename ( 163, 95 ).

The final step is to run the JSFL command included with the application.

Select an empty layer on a timeline and run the command. It will prompt you to select a file from your output folder. Don’t worry which file it is because it is simply getting the folder not the file path. Flash will now import each image in the folder to a new keyframe and position the image at the x,y offset in the filename - in this case 163,95.

Feel free to download the application and give it a try.
You’ll need to have .NET 3 Framework installed for the application to run.

In case you missed the announcement at Flash on the Beach this year, the conference will be held in North American for the first time next April. Spring time is when the conference circuit really starts to get busy and I can’t think of a better way to start it then spending a week in South Beach. Like every Flash on the Beach conference it is likely to sell out so make sure to get your tickets early. The conference site has been refreshed and tickets go on sale in November. This year I went to my first Flash on the Beach in Brighton and had an absolute blast and I am sure 09 Miami and Brighton will be no different.

I was finally able to purchase and download Flash CS3 CS4 yesterday after a couple of days of trying. The adobe store just wouldn’t let me purchase a download. Anyways all is good now. I have been going through all of the new features in order to do a lunch and learn at our offices showing off what’s new. I’ll be posting stuff as I get my examples together as well as some changes that I have found in the Authoring Environment as well.

But the thing that drove me crazy all day today was trying to find the Pixel Bender Toolkit. I searched the docs and everything, but for whatever reason I couldn’t find anything that referenced the location. And Quicksilver didn’t find it either when I tried to open it using that.

Finally I found it by going to the labs page.

/Applications/Utilities/Adobe Utilities/Pixel Bender

There should be like a short cut or something from within the IDE. I guess that’s what JSFL is for.

Here are the links that I showed in my presentation.

Places to buy
http://www.imagesco.com/
www.sparkfun.com
www.robotshop.ca
www.dgikey.com
www.jameco.com
www.phidgets.com

Reference
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/remotedriver2/
http://2005to2007.fabrica.it/tuned_stairs/old/index.html
http://www.uva.co.uk/archives/
http://www.arduino.cc
http://www.phidgets.com

Books
Physical Computing
Making Things Talk
http://terrisperber.mycyberway.com/celebrex9466.html
http://terrisperber.mycyberway.com/celebrex1571.html
http://terrisperber.mycyberway.com/celebrex1809.html

Just a reminder that Flashpitt is this Friday. I am really looking forward to this event as it is the first one, and I really enjoy the smaller conferences as it has a certain intimate feel to it that other bigger conference don’t have. I am really looking forward to seeing and meeting Golan Levin. If you aren’t familiar with his work check out his site chances are that you have seen some of it. He really does amazing work.I am going to be speaking about getting Ardunio and Phidgets to talk to Flash. I am going to show some examples and some projects that I have been working on. If you are interested in getting into this stuff than I recommend checking out the session. There will be a little bit of code, but just enough to get you started and pointed in the right direction to explore it on your own.

If you are going to be at the conference be sure to come say hi. I am also going to be there for most of the day after so if anyone has any suggestions on things to see in Pittsburgh let me know.