You can watch it now or read this thing first. This post contains spoilers but it might help you to understand demo better.

There are several ways to view this demo:

1. The blazing performance and highest quality way (recommended):
a) Download the standalone player here. (NOT THE DEBUGGER)
b) Download the swf + mp3 here and open it with that player.

2. Play in browser. Great quality but not as good in performance.
a) By visiting this link

3. Watch the video.
a) HD Video at YouTube

Making of ‘Sparkle a Moment’ by Away3D Development Team and Evoflash

It was 18th of August when Rob Bateman, the head man of Away3D framework (the worlds most advanced open source flash 3D engine), sent me an email and asked for a demo for Robbie’s and Richie‘s session at Adobe MAX 2011. We did this sort of collaboration with Away3D guys last year. Although it was a insane job I was stoked to burn my self out a bit again for sake of art and passion for this sport.

I introduced an idea, made a little synapsis and created a rough mood board.
Minomus made the track for me last Spring for Assembly demo which I never coded so we had that with us from point zero. (a very good thing.)
Here’s the synapsis:

“Into the endless darkness two light spheres are born. Slowly giving meaning and life to surroundings. In gentle moving light of spheres objects are showing their forms. Objects are symbols of science, history, society, evolution. nature, liquid and time. When a sphere come close to object it’ll be shown by the light of sphere and can become life. It can start levitate, sparkle, move, glow or break apart. Eventually spheres will light up everything. All is glamorous and flourishing. Suddenly spheres pop into little sparkles and disappear. Everything turn into deep endless darkness again.”

People liked it (or was too busy to dislike it) so I got a green light to do the direction again. The Flash on the Beach was closing and everybody was way too busy and could not work for demo. We had a little meet up at the conference and could pick up models for the demo. Other then that it was just drinking and fooling around. After all kind of delays we ended up creating this demo in less then two weeks. Fabrice Closier and Richard Olsson was working with 3D models and Ringo Blanken did examples of physics. David Lenaerts committed a stack of his special effects and went to vacation. I tried to get things together. Worked epic hours with camera cuts, setup elements and desperately struggled to get something to screen so we could move on. Once we got things rolling the process was smooth as nylon. With this kind of abstract idea it’s very important to get something done and move on from there. It took a lot of everybody’s faith to get demo in state that it started to make at least some sort of sense. I’m quite sure it won’t make sense to most of the viewers after all, but at least we got it done!

Here are screenshots of scenes and some comments about them:

Sparkles are born in to darkness. Cold and warm light. You know… Symbols of Yin and yang, thermodynamics, sweet and bitter, life and death… all that kind of shit.

A clock. And cogs. Symbols of time obviously, but also progress.

Eagle. Is a historical symbol of strength, courage, farsightedness and immortality. It is considered to be the king of the air and the messenger of the highest Gods. This is obviously nonsense as we’ll witness in near future where everything eventually vanish. (talking about the demo not 2012…) Eagle is also an animal and represents the Animalia.

We dive under water and what we find? no.. it’s not salmon. It’s tuna and David’s awesome realtime mirror ball. Fish is of course part of Animalia, but also very important symbol in various of religions.

Lunar eclipse is here to remind us of cycling nature of world. As a symbol it’s very important in all sort of nonsenses like astrology. It also looked nice with radial blur.

The train leads us to humans and society. It’s developing extremely fast. The technological progress seems invincible. It slithers through all obstacles.

We’ll move on to military tanks. While band plays ironic smooth jazz they drive in perfect formation. Firmly and certainly jumping off the cliff and form pile of junk.

We follow sparks and see Hercules, the demigod, the son of Zeus at the bottom of highest stone pole. Eventually he will fall.

Demogod now fall into pile of stones. Gravity fade down. Sparkles vanish and void darkness continues.

Simply put demo is about lifespan. It’s constant property that everything has.

I’ve been mostly listening to these records during past two weeks while doing demo:
Tori Amos – Night of Hunters and Ladytron – Gravity The Seducer
They might explain this madness a bit.

Big hugs to Away3D guys Rob, Richard, David and especially to Fabrice and Ringo who did a lot of work and had solution to all problems we faced during this process.

Ahh it feels good to have GPU support in Flash at last! Until next time…

Ohh and here’s guys shared session with Flare3D guys at Adobe MAX.

View in HD at YouTube

If you haven’t seen the demo I suggest that you watch it first and then continue reading this post since it contains spoilers.

When we first realized that Rob and Richard got the opportunity to speak at the Adobe MAX it came obvious that we needed to build up some sort of kick ass demo to convince people of the greatness of Away3D. First idea was to build a racer game (yeah lol) and Wipeout type of fast phase game was something we found cool enough. Then it came to our attention that Alternative3D was building a Racer game. This forced us to go back to drawing board and discuss about our options. It was quite obvious that another racer game wouldn’t be such a great idea anymore. We were just released the Spiral Out demo where me and David coded side by side and it worked really well. Rob suggested that we could create something like that. I thought that it was the greatest idea of all. Demoscene type of ‘music video’ demo naturally got me excited.

This sort of project contains a lot of angles, but I’m going to lighten up it from my perspective. Maybe you’ll get a glimpse of how these babys are born.

The Creative process

We had a team of 5 coders and asked Minomus from Evoflash with Glxblt for music. We had specific roles for each coders. Rob took care of the core 3D engine. Richard and Fabrice did all the modeling work. David created most of the effects voodoo and I took the responsibility of directing. Everybody took part for creating the idea.

With the bunch like this the project can turn into a mayhem of creative vortex and epic battle of toes stepping. So I thought it would be essential to get everybody into same state of mind. We started by getting an agreement on the rough synopsis. After the “rough synopsis”-project (which contained a stack of extremely bizarre emails with colorful adjectives and naive romantic thoughts) I created a visual moodboard and color schema for us:

Moodboard of the futuristic city:

Color schema:

For the music I wrote this little summary of our ideas:

We also collected a video references:

When it comes to creating a demo all this preparation is good, but hardly never shape the demo too much. The final result will be what comes out after endless testing and rethinking. The best things comes out from flow and flow can be achieved by working around the subject. For coders this means coding, testing, failing, coding, thinking, playing, coding, failing, coding and enlightenment.

When you are dealing with talented people like these the key to success is freedom. Everybody should at all states have the feeling of if they come up an idea it’ll probably end up to the demo. It’s collective of skills that’ll define the outcome. If everybody doesn’t get the maximum satisfaction of their work it’s not worth doing.

Emotion

It’s important to understand the artistic layer demos have. I’m talking about the feeling you get after experiencing the opus. It took you into another world. You are not quite sure what it is but it moved something in your brains. It feed your emotions. It activated some parts in your brain that stay in sleep on your normal everyday life. Maybe it inspired you. Maybe it confuses you. Maybe it got you thinking of something. All this information that was put to the art work by creators is now transformed into you and something completely unique has born. It’s combination of your and creators mind.

Freedom of express

I would like to point out that at the same weekend we were busy fine tuning this piece something exceptional happened. A new flash demogroup released their first demo.
Area Unstable by Badsquare is a demo made by Ralph Hauwert with graphics by SanderFocus and music by legendary Gloom.

In general I look at these pieces of art from the point of view where first there was nothing and now there’s this. What a beautiful event that is when group of people join their minds and create something just because they feel like doing it. I think we should encourage our each others to express our self’s with completely freedom. Expression can never be ugly. It’s the most holy thing we have. People who judge others will to express have competitive mind set and does it with motives I found as sign of immature mind.

I would like to thank the Away3D members for having me to this project and made this possible. For all you creators out there: Let the creativity flourish and take a part of it.

p.s. Sorry for being such a preacher :)

As I mentioned earlier I invited David Lenaerts to help with the demo. All those fancy Away3dLite stuff with shadows and reflections came by his hands. Awesome!

I also compiled the whole shit through Joa Ebert’s Apparat. It did speed up it a bit.

I also had a presentation at Assembly. I talked about my flash art and introduced the evoTinyEngine, evoCunningParticleEngine and evoSync-tool. I haven’t found the recording of the speech yet but here are some of the links I had there.

– evoCunningParticleEngine at googlecode
– evoTinyEngine at googlecode
– download the evoSync air app

You can also download the presentation in pdf format.

Then the bad news. I had an accident last Friday. I fall down from the fence and my wedding ring got stuck at the top of the fence.
The ring peel off all the skin, muscles and stuff out of my finger. The main tragedy about it was that it also ruined my fingers blood vessels and the finger had to be amputated. So I won’t be coding new experiments for a while now I guess. I also need to learn how to type fast with 9 fingers. I will recover eventually, but it’ll take some time and hard work.

I’ll post more info about the particle engine later when it won’t hurt so much to type.

p.s. We also did this little demo with Jalava to show that 4k intro can be done with Flash. It’s not too fancy but it proofs the concept :)

We gave us a huge goal this year to produce three demos and I can say for sure that there will be at least one! It has always been a bit shame that flash demos are lacking competition. I started a crusade this year when Peter Nitsch asked me to help him with the blockparty invitation intro. I introduced him the evoTinyEngine and everything went really smoothly. It’s easy to work with such a talented person.

This experiment gave me certainty that this is the right way to introduce demo making to new people. The scene of flash experimentalists is huge and I have always find it odd that these guys won’t release demos. I’ve had a conversations with skilled people who would like to do a demos but are hesitating for some reason. Maybe it’s the respect they give to PC demo coders and the whole scene. Maybe they feel that they would ruin it?

The demoscene does not equal to PC-demoscene. As Wikipedia so nicely put’s it:

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer. The main goal of a demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.

The platform can and should be what ever. The point is to show what you can do with your skills on that platform. It can be Amiga, modern PC, Android mobile, your mothers washing machine or Flash player inside browser.

For this years Assembly Real wild demo I invited David Lenaerts to help me with the demo. I’m hoping that this way he’ll get an easy push inside the rabbit hole of demoscene. I’ve also been drinking around Europe (=ones in Amsterdam…) and challenging people to do a demo. (=I asked Ralph Hauwert ones…)

It’s a big job to create a 4 minutes demo. It takes a lot of code, designing and time. The evoTinyEngine is build to help. I’ve also created a new tool: evoSync. Which is a synchronisation tool made with Adobe Air. If everything goes well I’ll give a speech at Assembly and show how to use these tools. I’ll also share as opensource the latest versions of evoTinyEngine, evoSync and evoCunningParticleEngine after that weekend.

There is still plenty of time to create a demo. So why not?

Demo is a combination of frameworks, effects, graphics and sound. Handling all of that data isn’t an easy task. It can turn into a very neglectful pile of code and in worst scenario list of foolish performance costly if-statements.

When coding a demo the main focus is always on effects. That’s what you wanna do. When the right moment comes you want to get straight to the business. This often leads to situation where you just create a class, setup assets and run things on your EnterFrame event. You’ll end up with pile of classes that have a lot of similarities and it’s a pain in to ass to construct a demo from them. You’ll end up coding everything twice or you just realize that it’s not worth it and play the “no demo this year”-card.

My opensource demo engine evoTinyEngine is designed to serve two goals:
Maximum performance and effect creation efficiency.

It has three elements: Assets, Engine and Modifiers.

Idea is that you create Modifiers that use stuff from Assets to draw into a shared bitmapdata. The engine manages the Modifiers by initializing, calling their render method, providing essential data like time and dispose Modifiers when they are no longer needed. All this happens in a periods of 16th note beats.

This way you separate sequencing from effect creation. You just create effects(=Modifiers) and when the time comes for building them all together it’s easy and another fun phase of demo creation. You can run multiple Modifiers at the same time and they can have four roles:

1. preprocessing // first render
2. effect // second render
3. postprocessing // third
4. overlay // last

I rarely use the preprocessing. It’s there for to give possibility to stack two main effects together in desired order. Effect is an effect and postprocessing comes after that. Those can be radial blurs, blooms or some distortion effects, what ever. Overlay is for overlay graphics or texts that you don’t want to be affected by postprocessing.

Read this pdf to get more detailed information.

Here’s the hello world code:

It has been used in Severity of Grey and Blockparty 2010 invtro. Happy coding.

These sources consist four different parts:
– EvoTinyEngine
– Evo3d
– EvoTween
– SoG Demo

None of these are documented so I have created this little pdf to clarify the concept of demoengine used in this demo.

These libraries are rather easy to use. Here’s the HelloWorld of EvoTinyEngine:

You should have all the examples you need about other libraries in the SoG Demo zip. Here are few example lines about syntax’s.

Evo3d is powerful because of following solutions:
– It use linked list.
– It only z-sort meshes not polygons.
– The z-sort is based on Insertion Sorting. Slightly modified from Michael Baczynski‘s code.
– It uses the graphics.drawGraphicsData(graphicsData:Vector.IGraphicsData) method.

I hope this will give you some ideas or help you some way. It would be awesome to see demo made with this stuff!
I’m going to develop these more, but won’t start an open svn since I do not want this stuff to become a burden for me. It could feel like a job and I all ready have one. I think I’ll post some more libraries after next demo. Don’t report any bugs if you find them.

I have few new ideas about approaches to get that 3d much faster, but now I need a break.

It was ranked second. What a gargantuan surprise for us.
quote Jalava: “Real confusion was: Why did everyone vote our prod in 64k :) It really didn’t deserve the place from my point of view. I mainly coded it for the giggles :)”

Well it’s understandable that it was appreciated as a milestone (first flash 64k) , but this rank was way too much. It wasn’t that good intro. We could do so much better. You could do better. And you should try to do better. Please come on create something better! The bar is not set too high, _yet_.

This what it’s all about. Beat us so we can beat you and we all get more skills. I’m eagerly hoping to see some entries next year made with flash in Real Wild or even in 64k.

Sources and plaaplaa’s coming later.

Jalava created an excellent soundsynth with all kinds of effects and filters. You should focus on the details of the sound when it’s released. So he took the 64k task and the real wild was for me.

I have spent a lot of time creating this evo3d and wanted to build a proper showcase for it. I also created a very small but fast demo engine and tiny tweener that both benefits the performance of linked lists. Unfortunately Jalava won’t use them on 64k and only little part of the evo3d. So completely waste of time from me? -Well not entirely.

No matter if they are small in bytes, they are strong in performance and in memory usage. So this years real wild is build with them. I respect all the open source projects out there, but it’s great to have all the code in demo home made. It also gives more possibilities when I can tune the library the way I need.

The real wild is almost done. Only little adjust here and there. So make sure you check it out on next weekend.
I also publish all the sources after the compo or at least in a week from that.

Traditionally we have took a part on Flash compo, Browser compo or Real wild compo depending on what the organizers decide to call it (‘the compo that flashdemos should be post’).

EvoFlash has won those compos in three years in a row and we decided that it’s time to turn bar more higher. I personally think that the most appealing compo of all is the 64k and this year we are crazy enough to go for it!

At the moment we have a demoengine that is 4k 3.6k, 12k 3D engine and soundsynth+track in 20-30k.
So there’s still something like 20k for the actual demo. Let’s hope we can pull everything together and surprise the scene with our platform.

I’ll give all code (at least made by me) away after the compo.