RIA

Another quick one this. I stumbled across another one of those nostalgic particle tutorials that showed how to make a waterfall. It was really basic stuff, but inspiring nonetheless. Being a jerk, i decided to make the ultimate particle waterfall effect, what with displacement maps and diffraction and all that good stuff.

It turns out, however, that this is very boring to do.

Instead, as i was playing around with the particles and various combinations and sequences of blend modes, I started listening to my current favorite contemporary composer, Max Richter, and I wound up making this thing instead. (Beware! Music! Also, CPU murder!)

This kind of thing just happens naturally when I start playing around. It’s not particularly complex technically, more a question of constantly tweaking values until you feel happy. In ActionScript terms, it’s a linked list object pool of 100k particles, a double buffer of bitmapdata, two blendmodes and a blurfilter, as well as a few tweaks timed to trigger at moments in the music. A mouse trailer tracks the, er, mouse, and samples colors from an underlying image. I don’t put much thought into the images i use for backgrounds, they’re more color palettes than anything else. The result in this case is a little chaotic i think, but the point for me was the music. I wanted something hypnotic and organic, sort of like thousands of leaves blowing in the wind, and i wanted it to lift and fall with the music. I think i did that pretty okay for a first ;-)

The music is Autumn Music 2 by Max Richter off his fantastic album Memoryhouse.

I’m still not 100% sure it’s a good idea to electrocute your eyes every few seconds. Feel free to complain about any headaches!