I’m off to Flash Forward this week. It should be a great party in a cool city with some uber nerds. Just about all I need, besides my wife and pooch. Looking forward to seeing the Masonic Temple it’s being held in, and the new format chosen by Adobe. This will officially be my fourth Flash Forward, and I’m relieved that I haven’t been chosen to speak this year. Last year was a tad awkward to be told by your boss that you’re going to be a speaker. Um yea thanks, I thought that would be something I’d chose to do not unknowingly penned in for. Pretty standard operating procedure at Arnold.

I’m also fired up that Steve and I will be driving the 10 hours or so down to San Fran from Portland, stopping half way to camp in Redwoods National Park.

Thanks to North for sending us.

So, if you’re headed to San Fran this week let me know. It’d be good to meet up with some cool peeps.

The following is experimental drawing done for North. The idea was to recreate a tree line resembling the pacNW, and an aurora borealis. For inspiration I watched several youtube videos of a real aurora borealis. Everything on the screen is drawn on the fly with code and math. Nothing is ‘hand drawn’, right down to the branches on the trees.

View : Actionscript Aurora Borealis

The aurora and trees are autonomous and random within the following effective ranges.

// trees
var treeDistanceApart:Number = 30
var numBuds:Number = 4
var numTreeBurst:Number = 10
var maxSubBranch:Number = 3;
var maxSubAngle:Number = .07//4*Math.PI/4;
var maxSize:Number = 6;
var branchLenMax:Number = 65;
var branchLenMin:Number = 40;
var minAlpha:Number = 70
var maxAlpha:Number = 100

// aurora
var maxLines:Number = 40;
var minLines:Number = 1;
var trailSpeed:Number = 5
var maxLineHeight:Number = 150;
var lineXrange:Number = 70;
var lineYrange:Number = 50;
var lineAlphaMax:Number = 70;
var lineThickMax:Number = 20;
var maxInt:Number = 200
var minInt:Number = 10
var maxFade:Number = 30
var minFade:Number = 1
var minBlur:Number = 30
var maxBlur:Number = 100
var minGlow:Number = 1
var maxGlow:Number = 10

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