Everyday Flash

I am not a game developer. For the last 10 years (with some short intervals) I’ve been working as a Flash designer and developer and I have been creating projects more or less related to advertising such as animations (including banners, that I actually enjoyed making), video sites, rich media interfaces, web applications, 3d simulations and, sometimes indeed, simple games.

I believe however, that Unity3D is much more that a game development platform, and all those kind of projects could be tackled with Unity3D as well. In some cases the result would be pretty awesome and way beyond anything we can currently dream of with Flash and Actionscript – and this kind of opportunity is what I am looking for. (In some other cases it could end up with a disaster, similar to what happens when sites that clearly require HTML are done with Flash. We will see those too, simply because errare humanum est).

Technology adoption is not as fast as we could wish. I’m sure that eventually Unity3D will become the standard for 3D applications on the web, but we’re not there yet. So far it has been very successful with games for the iPhone and it starts to emerge as the tool of choice for online games. The advertising business will follow and adopt it as well. We can expect top interactive agencies and production companies to start releasing Unity3D productions soon. I hope this will happen within this or the next year. Chances are that such projects are already in the making.

The reason why this will happen is that Unity3D is versatile. It is marketed as a “game development tool”, but it has numerous features that allow much more that that. It allows to integrate diversified content (2D, 3D, video, sound), has a great animation tool and a powerful scripting API to create any kind of complex logic.

As I got back from FITC Amsterdam loaded with new energy and inspiration, I decided to take a deeper look at Unity3D scripting and go at least a bit beyond the basics and beyond the “building a 3rd person shooter” scenario. As a long time Flash developer there are some problem/questions that are typical to Actionscript technology and I decided to check how similar problems can be solved with Unity3D. Here are the first 3 questions that came to my mind, pretty basic actually:

1. How to dynamically load an image into Unity3D and do something with it?
2. How to draw lines, points and shapes at runtime?
3. How to generate content with code?

The questions order starts with those that have been easiest to answer. I have some more questions lined up, so this post might get updated. Anyway, in the coming days (or weeks rather) I’ll be posting the solutions. I made some experiments, I have some code to share and some tips that I found on the way. See you soon!

The conference season is upon us!

Following my last year short presentation at Flash On The Beach and at the Warsaw Flash Camp, this year I will continue my adventure with public speaking. In the next months I will be having my sessions at 3 highly interesting events.

1. FITC Amsterdam, February 22nd-23rd

FITC Amsterdam is only a few weeks away. I’ve been to FITC last year and I really enjoyed the conference (and the parties too). I am thrilled to be back this year as a speaker. If you want to catch my session it’s on Monday (Feb 22nd) at 12:30. If you are interested in Unity and in 3D in general you should definitely attend! For more information, here’s a detailed session description. I hope to see you there!

FITC it’s of course much more than my presentation. There are 2 days packed with interesting sessions, so be sure to checkout the schedule to see what’s interesting for you. There is also a party every evening – a great opportunity to do some networking and to have a few beers and some other stuff (remember, we’re in Amsterdam!). So grab your tickets before they’re all gone!

2. London LFPUG Meeting, March 25th

If you can’t attend FITC and you miss my session in Amsterdam, don’t panic! You can catch me again next month in London. On March 25th I will speak at the next in the series of LFPUG meetings.

It will be a evening packed with realtime 3D, as I will be speaking together with Rob Bateman from the Away3D team. Here’s some detailed info about the event. The event is free, all you need to do is register, so if you are in London don’t miss it!

3. FITC Toronto, April 25th-27th

Finally in April I’ll be making the move over the Atlantic all the way to Canada for FITC Toronto, where I will also be talking about Unity. There is no schedule yet, but it’s should be coming soon. However, the tickets are already on sale. If you hurry you might even get a early bird price!

This is very exciting for me for several reasons. First, it’s a major conference with 3 days of sessions, workshops and even a recruiting event. It’s not to be missed not only if you live in Toronto, but for anyone in the region. And I’ve heard people come for FITC from all over Canada and US.

Second of all it’s my first time I will attend a conference in North America. I looking forward to meet a lot of people whom so far I knew only from blogs and twitter. So if you are around don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Finally, it will be my first visit to Toronto and I heard a lot of good stuff about the city. We also plan a short family vacation afterwards to visit Montreal and Quebec.

Next?

I’m currently entirely focused on those upcoming events, preparing all the materials and the presentation. However, I hope for more opportunities in the future. If you happen to organize a Flash and/or Unity event and you are looking for speakers be sure to let me know!

I don’t have any further plans at this moment, except that I will also attend OFFF in Paris in June (as guest, not as speaker).

Photo credits [1] [2] [3]

There’s something you’ll quickly realize when you start playing with Unity. It’s the fact that you won’t go far without some basic knowledge of a 3D editor. I’ve been using Blender for my Flash 3D experiments, but I can’t honestly say I knew anything about it. I was able to model some very basic shapes, and whenever I needed something more complex I’d ask someone who’s more experienced or just find a free model on the Internet. With Unity it just doesn’t make sense. You won’t be able to understand half of the functionality if you don’t have a 3D editor to work with. By the way, I’m not the only one who noticed this.

As a logical consequence, I decided to take a step back and learn Blender. I don’t want to go into details on the choice of software. If you prefer Maya or Cinema4D, fine. I grew to like Blender, but I know it makes a horrible first impression. The thing about Blender is that it’s free, and that’s a huge advantage for beginners.

After some time of modeling, texturing and setting up lights and I started to really love that. I felt like I was taken 10 years back, at the time when I was discovering Flash, HTML, building my first “home page”. I’m sure you all know the great feeling when you start to understand something new and your skills grow every day. There’s nothing like it! (Ok, there are other things better than that, but let’s stay within our geeky subject).

At first I wanted to get just enough skills to continue with Unity3D development. But soon I realized that this might be what I’d like to do for a living. Wait, what? Can you imagine? I’m in my thirties. I’m doing pretty well in flash development business. Is there anything more stupid that dropping all this and becoming a 3D designer? And how many years I would need to become any good at this? Or maybe it’s just a matter of a couple months to master the tool and I’ll be all set? But maybe I don’t have what it takes to be a 3D designer. However a fundamental thing I believe in, is that there’s no such thing as innate talent and all you need is enough persistence…

I’ve been struggling with those questions for a while, and I don’t have any answers yet. In the meantime I ordered some books, found some tutorials and kept learning to keep all the options open. I still have a long way to go, but I can already see some results.

As my modeling skills grow, I feel much more confident as a 3D developer because I can understand where the assets come from, how they are built, how visual effects are achieved. Those things were like a black box to me before. Now I can even build some 3D stuff myself. It’s so much worth the effort even if I’ll never work as full time 3D designer.

The two Unity examples above are my first, modest 3D modeling experiences. One is a mini game. It features a scenery that I populated with a few models including my first car model. Apart from modeling the scenery elements I used that as a testing ground for many Unity features like the terrain engine, line and trail renderers, rigid body physics, car simulation, particle systems and of course scripting. The end result is a bit random, but I don’t remember having that much fun for a long time!

The second is a small interior scene (really small!). I couldn’t grasp how lightmaps work in Unity until one morning I woke up and I just knew (yeah, that’s how it happens sometimes!). During the day, I quickly threw up this demo to test if my understanding was correct. I think it was, even though in the end the shadows came out too subtle. Anyway, I’m doing more experiments on that subject now and maybe I’ll write a separate post on how to work with lightmaps in Blender & Unity.

That’s it for now! I’ll see where it takes me, but you should expect more 3D modeling related posts on this blog from now on. Also, I’m not giving up on coding… yet ;)

I extremely happy to announce that I will speak at this year’s Flash on the Beach in Brighton. It starts two weeks from now and if you haven’t already got a ticket it might be too late, because they’re all sold out (sorry).

It will be my first appearance on such major Flash event. I am taking part in the Elevator Pitch session, which features 20 speakers (!) in 1 hour – 3 minutes each. So it won’t be a long presentation, but be sure – it will be intense. I will show a new 3D Flash experiment made especially for FOTB. The session takes place on the second day of the conference, Tuesday 22nd at 9AM in the Brighton Dome. Hope to see you there!

On a related note: if you live in Antwerp, on September 16th I will be also speaking at an event organized by my friends at Mr. Henry. I’ll present some of my new and older experiments and talk about 3D in Flash in general. You can find more info about this here.

On June 9th the Polish Adobe User Group organized a Flash Camp in Warsaw. It was the first meeting of this kind in Poland. I had the privilege to be one of the speakers. It was a one day event featuring 6 sessions all related to Flash & Flex. It aroused great interest in the local Flash Community and more than 300 people attended

We kicked off in the morning with a very comprehensive presentation by Serge Jespers on the Flash Platform. Serge went through a lot of interesting projects including some of the best Augmented Reality examples. He also showcased his favorite AIR applications. Apparently AIR is not used only for Twitter clients! But seriously, I neglected this technology so far, but I promised myself to fix this in the near future. I’m looking for some ideas for a simple AIR app now… a Collada viewer maybe?

Next, the Platform Evangelist from Poland, Piotr Walczyszyn gave us an insightful presentation on Flash Catalyst and the new Flash Builder. I use FDT to do all my Flash stuff for some time now, so all the things he presented were totally new to me. I must say I was surprised how fast and efficient the new workflow is. Things like working directly with PSD files in Catalyst look great (how many hours have I spent “cutting” PSD files and importing them into Flash!) He build a complete application connected to a database without writing a single line of code! It was amazing… and a bit frightening too ;)

Wojtek Ptak made a great presentation about building large scale RIA’s. Usually this kind of applications are not my primary interest but Wojtek showed us some really inspiring stuff and it was a pleasure to listen to him speaking.

Unfortunately I could not attend the other sessions, because I was rehearsing my own. It was my first public presentation, so I was pretty excited but also a bit nervous, especially that I did not expect such a huge crowd.

During my session, I focused on 3D in Flash (of course!). By showing some new and old demos I tried to explain the fundamental concepts of 3D graphics and how they are implemented in Actionscript. After my session I had a few minutes to answer some questions. Most of them were about Papervision3D, and the nature of those questions clearly showed that they were coming from very experienced developers. I did my best to answer all of them.

Overall it was a great experience, and I’d like to thank the organizers for inviting me. I like the idea of public speaking. It’s a great way to share some thoughts and knowledge, but also, most importantly, to meet interesting people. I feel it nicely complements my blogging experience, so from now on I’ll be looking for more speaking opportunities.

Today I switched my blog from Blogger to Wordpress. I was a tough decision, but it was better to do it now, then later, when my blog will have more content. This operation might have caused, as a side effect, the resetting of all the posts in the RSS feed, which in turn did show them as “unread” in the readers. They are not new though, so just mark them as read… and sorry for the mess! :)