I realize all my posts so far has one thing in common. Perlin noise. So why make an exception this time. Remember the post about fire? Make the animation go in the opposite direction, change the colors and some parameters, put in on a texture and mix with blendmodes and filters and you got yourself another element of nature. Water.

When I play first-person-shooters like Just Cause, Far Cry or Uncharted 2 there is one thing that I always remember most. Water-effects. I forget about the story and just play around with it. I hope you will remember this one

The cliff and water is simple models created in 3D Studio Max, then imported as a scene into Away3D with the Loader3D. The materials are converted to PhongMaterials. I tried to use a normal-map and a pixelbender-material on the cliff to get a wet look, but it was to CPU-intense together with the other effects, so that had to go.

The trick to make the water refract the light was to render the view twice. One with the waterfall alone and with just black and red colors. And another pass with the final result. Then the first pass is used to create a displacementMapFilter on the view. It’s quite slow, but I couldn’t resist to activate it by default when the visual result is much better. Try to switch it off to see the difference in quality and speed.

Update: I strongly recommend using Flash player 10.1 with this one, it’s a huge difference in speed! And how come Chrome is so damn faster than the rest? I added a slider for the texture resolution as well, so that performance can be adjusted. Lame, I know…

Open demo

I found the texture for the cliff over here.

Procedural graphics is surely my favorite. The concept of create visual things with just code. Really comes in handy when your a crappy designer and still want to do visual stuff. Here you can see the result of yet another experiment on this track. It’s a eye-shader for generating procedural eyes. The 3D-engine of choice is Away3d. I use a CompositeMaterial consisting a PhongMultiPassMaterial and a SphericEnvMapPBMaterial (for the environment reflections). The bitmap that is used in the material is generated by a haxe-swf that is loaded in runtime. Just as previous experiments. The same bitmap is used as a base for the spherical normalmap. That adds a nice displacement to the surface. The iris is quite simple and could have more layers and complexity to get a more realistic pattern. Anyway, the texture looks something like this.

When wrapping this on a sphere it will fit seamlessly . I know, the blood-vessels aren’t that great. Perhaps I should use lines with turbulence instead.

Design your own eye

Here is a tool where you can try the different settings and create a unique eye.
Open editor

Demo

This “mars-attacks”-demo follows the mouse. To get two eyes I duplicates the output from the view. Thats why he can’t look at his nose (if existed). Notice that he is reacting to light, sort of…

Open demo

There have been a lot of things to deal with lately so I have kept a low profile online. But last night I finally did a little experiment. It’s a little toy to make models made of cubes in away3d. Or infact, there is just ordinary planes. I suspect that it should be much faster if I created the geometry inside i single object, but this was fast enough for this experiment.

The material of choice is a WhiteShadingBitmapMaterial. The shadows are baked into the bitmap depending on the surrounding nodes. To render the shadow I use fillRect-method on the BitmapData. To make the shadows more soft I use the diffuse-color, but with lower brightness. When all shadow-rectangles are drawn the bitmap is blurred with applyFilter. The shadows was added to get a kind of fake ambient occlusion. Each cube, or node, has it’s own position in a 3d-grid (multidimensional array). When a plane is clicked a new node and its corresponding planes is created, animated and evaluated. If there is any doublets or planes inside the structure, it’s removed.

Click on the some of the models for a closeup view. Or just try it out yourself: Extrude the cube, dude!

Open

I have been a huge fan of voxels and voxel-engines lately. I know it’s pretty big and few voxels, but let me call this a micro-voxel-editor please

Last time I made some wood. Now let’s burn that up. Still experimenting with the same 3D perlin noise as before, but this time animated. When you can take control over each pixel of noise it’s easy to add extra rules to form the shape of the noise such as turbulence based on y-value or an offset animation along the z-axis to gain some depth. Applying “ridges” to the perlin noise (invert all negative values when the range is between -1 to 1) makes the flames look more interesting. The bitmap generated is just 80×80 and 2 octaves of Perlin noise, so the possibilities are quite limited.

Click here or on the fireplace above to get warm.

If you want to see how it works, here is a zip with sources for a simple example. No graphics or UI is included though. The noise is compiled with Haxe, but a swf is included if you want to skip that.

See this post for additional credits.

My next track on my journey through procedural domains goes through the woods. Not so revolutionary maybe, but I haven’t seen it in flash before and that’s enough challenge for me. And it’s a good way to learn the basics of textures. Here is the first tests:

For the sphere, I use the spherical mapping from the previous post. The cube has one texture for each side. One benefit if using a 3D procedural texture is that the wrapping is accurate and it looks like a block of massive wood. I can also use the optimized 3D Perlin noise as turbulence to make the grains look more natural.

Simple tree texture designer

I have added a few parameters to change, but several features could be added like: more object types, ring-types (tri,saw, sine), base texture blending.

Try it out here

The images in the last post was created with this tool. I use the heightmap to create a normal map with a excellent class called SphericalDispToNormConverter. So since I now have a heightmap and a normal map, Away3D can do the rest. The material used in this example is the PhongMultiPassMaterial. When “displacement map” is disabled a simple BitmapMaterial is used. The @away3D -team has really done a great job with the pixelbender materials.

Among the settings you can choose between a regular perlin noise or a ridged one. You will notice that the difference is pretty big. Also, check out the different presets.

The resolution on the heightmap is 400×200, but scaled down in the UI. (By the way I can’t tell you enough how I love the minimalcomps by mr @bit101.)  The heightmap-generation is pretty heavy on the CPU, so choose browser with care and stay away from debug-players

Sphere designer

What do you think? Time for a generative material-library for Away3D?

I’m not quite done experimenting with 3d perlin noise. Another cool feature that I haven’t seen in flash is to wrap the noise on a sphere seamlessly. Here is the result:

Click the spheres for a slightly larger version

To get the texture to wrap seamless without distortion, we can use the 3d nature of the noise in a interesting way. If we evaluating the 3d-position of each point on the surface of a sphere we can get the noise in that particular point. To convert the point from 3d-space to 2d-space some trigonometry is needed. My math-skills really suck, but my cut-n-paste skills are excellent. Once again, LibNoise showed me the way with 5 lines of code. First I only got chaotic noise with some sort of repeating pattern. It took some time to figure out that I had to convert the numbers to a positive range.

lat = py / height * 180- 90;
lon = px / width * 360-180;
r = Math.cos(DEG_TO_RAD *  lat);

//range between 0-1
_x = (r * Math.cos (DEG_TO_RAD * lon) +1)*.5
_y = (Math.sin (DEG_TO_RAD * lat)+1)*.5
_z = (r * Math.sin(DEG_TO_RAD * lon)+1)*.5

For the sphere and the material/lighting I use Away3d. In the next post I will show you more about that and the tool for creating the different materials. Oh, and it’s looks a lot better animated

While doing research for the terrain editor I found a lot of different methods for creating noise. One of my favorite algorithms is “ridged fractal noise”. I haven’t found any examples of this in AS3 so I created my own version based on the Optimized Perlin Noise seen in the community before. I think the route of that source began with Ron Valstar’s AS3 version (@Sjeiti), then with a optimized version by @quasimondo, and further optimized with a haxe-version by Nicolas Cannasse. It was very easy to just add the ridged part to the noise generated. There is some source to look at in other languages such as C++, Java or C#. First some examples to see whats the characteristics of ridges. Some of them uses a Stok3d PhongShader created by @DerSchmale to add a nice depth:

It’s finally time to render a landscape with all the different parts that I have covered so far.

I’m really curious of your output and render-time, so please upload it to the gallery when you created your own landscape. The gallery will be published as soon as I got a collection of images.

This tool is in a very experimental phase and this applications using pretty much memory and CPU-power. There is plenty of memory-leaks and optimization that has to be fixed. But for now, I don’t want to focus on that. Some calculations freezing the player for a while. But I think that the tolerance-level is higher if the user can see the progress both with a bar and status-notifications. Notice the effect when drawing the geometry above sea-level. It’s completely cosmetic and waste of CPU but makes it looks more advanced

FlashTerrain demo

Post production

I have also added the possibility to do some adjustments on the result. For now you can change the colorMatrix (brightness, contrast, hue and saturation) and add some sharpening.

Save / upload

If you have a flickr account, you can save it to your own photostream. Or upload to the public gallery, also using flickr, but a account dedicated to FlashTerrain. Or of course, encode the image to a jpg and save it to your desktop.

Credits and useful links so far

Papervision3d: http://www.papervision.org
AS3Dmod library: http://code.google.com/p/as3dmod/
Stok3d: http://www.derschmale.com/2009/06/08/introducing-stok3d-more-fp10-3dpixel-bender-shading/
ColorMatrix: http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2007/12/colormatrix_upd.html
Gradient color component: http://mariosh.com/components/gradient-editor/
Advanced color picker: http://www.sephiroth.it/file_detail.php?id=150#
Multipart URLLoader Class by Eugene Zatepyakin (in-spirit): http://code.google.com/p/in-spirit/wiki/MultipartURLLoader
Flickr authorization control: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/08/12/flex-based-flickr-api-authorization-control/
phpFlickr: http://phpflickr.com/

Next step is to distribute the tree we just created on to the terrain. I use the heightmap as the source. I create an array with objects representing all pixels. The reason for this is that I now can filter and sort these points. First, filter out all points in the defined range, based on the y-value and the range defined in the editor. Then, sorting out a specified amount of random points, sort them on the z-value for correct render order. Before this last sorting I can add all different objects to the same batch. I’m sure there are much better and faster methods than this. Analyzing the terrain for more realistic distribution should make it more interesting.   When rendering, I have to make a render for each position and merge the result with the final image.  It will not work to just paste the result on top of the terrain. The tree is sometimes behind the terrain and partly hidden. And if the terrain is included in each pass, next render will cover the previous. So after some experimenting with masks, pixel bender matte calculation, my solution was this:

1. Render the object by itself in a transparent viewport.
2. Add the terrain and set the material to a white color material and viewport background color to white. Move the object to a new position and render.
3. Get the boundingbox of all none white pixels with getColorBoundsRect. This is the rectangle that we want to work with. Draw a new BitmapData with this rectangle from the viewport. Lets call it maskTree, the object with white surroundings.
4. Crop the transparent pass with the same clipping-rectangle  as maskTree. Lets call the result transparentTree.
5. Add effects like fog and filters like blur to transparentTree.
6. If the tree got covered by any terrain, the edges now has straight cuts because we just use a rectangle clipping. We have to fix that. Loop through all pixels in the maskTree . If  its completely white in the mask, its a transparent pixel in the transparent image, so set that pixel transparent in transparentTree. Left is a masked image, but with correct multiplied alpha colors.
7. Merge transparentTree with the final result. To do this a put the final canvas and the new object in sprites and cache them with draw() to a new final canvas
8. Send an event so the user can follow the progress and start over with next iteration.

I tried to use a matte pixelbender-filter so that I just had to render the viewport once, but the alpha-channel in flash is pre-multiplied (correct me if I’m wrong here), so the edges became white when blending it with the final canvas. One downside is that it’s pretty slow. Another is the z-sorting issues that occurs. Maybe a down-sampled heightmap can be used instead when setting the position in 3d space.

Shadows and effects

Because the result of each tree is a single transparent bitmap, I can use different effects on each tree. A blur-filter based on the distance to the camera is added. A small random value on the hue/saturation make the trees more random. If fog is enabled a color tint is added. I didn’t find out how to change the color-transformation correctly , so I found a workaround by setting the tint with TweenMax and change the progress to 0-1 depending on the z-position and fog amount. Have to work more on this later on.

I mentioned the shadow-layers in one of the previous posts. To add every shadow to the final result, I make a temporary container and add a sprite with a radial gradient fill for every tree and cache that with bitmapData.draw(). This is then baked into the texture with the multiply blendmode.

Distribution demo

Things to improve:

- There is plenty of optimization here to do here. This is the most time-consuming part.
- Check visibility against the clipping planes and skip those objects.
- Adjust all the effects with better z-depth-control.
- Let the position of the sun affect the brightness.
- More realistic distribution such as slope detection or algorithms.