elephant

Hav'nt gotten quite as much as i would like to have gotten done this weekend so far.  Some decent progress though.  I have my animal gallery's almost sorted out.  There is always one problem though, I can't get my path correct with something so the photos won't show up when you go through the web page.

if I was to go back to the start of this project, i would downplay the importance of actionscript type things.  Not that i am really even using that much, but what I am using tends to be a struggle every single step of the way.  I am just really not all that good at it.  At the beginning of the year I assumed I would eventually start to 'get it' like with HTML or CSS, but despite extra studying and all that...  aww well.  I'll just have to keep struggling on and do what I can.

In more fun news, I finished making my elephant today.  Stop motion shooting scheduled for tomorrow night. 

Work continues

After taking the good part of a week off to work on other class projects I am back into Major Project work.

I have put together a good part of the "welcome" and "den" movies, incorporating my stop motion video into the flash timeline with some basic actionscript linking things together.
I also scanned in some new textures so I can make some images that appear to be made out of paper in photoshop for buttons and the like.
I should have, for the most part those two movies done in the next couple of days.  There is more that could be done, but I will save that for the 'make everything look pretty and right' phase, which follows the get everything together phase and the "oh balls, how do I make actionscript actually do what I want" panic phase#2.

I plan on restarting the former phase this weekend.

welcome sequence finished (mostly)!

Here is the mostly complete welcome stop motion sequence.  A lot of work there for just a few seconds.  Of course I will be stopping the movie part of they way through so the user has a chance to read the speech bubble I will be putting in.  So a little flash functionality and I'll be moving on the the next step. 

Meerkat motion!

I did a practice at moving my meerkat puppet around and inserting that into a video, keying out the background.

I have to say I am pretty thrilled with the result.  There are still some problems you can see in the video ( a bit of green popping up, he runs a bit floaty, my silly hand popping in) but most importantly it all works!  Now I just have to iron out a few problems, do some planning and then I should almost be ready to start working on the welcoming sequence.

Video is below (you have to wait a few minutes for the videos to load, be patient)

new stuff

I decided to take a break from the irritating action script for a while and work on some other elements of the project.  I finally busted out the materials I have been collecting and did a test run of some stop motion I would like to use in the flash videos.  I will probably only use stop motion sequences for a few bits, like the opening welcome and a few other spots.  I was able to take the video below and put it in flash as a movieclip (it seems that it will only work right if it is an FLV).  I can still apply other layers and all that.  

So I will build those sequences in Premier.  I also have made a puppet of the meerkat with 6 points of movement and interchangeable facial features!  I will probably do those stop motion sequences over a piece of green poster board, key out the background, and then add that video in seperately.  Coordinating the puppet with other backgrounds could be a bit of a challenge, but I am fairly confident it will work.  

It was nice to get away from code and hunching over a computer for a while!

Sending email out

I have got the code right to send an attachment out from a server using PHP.  It was pretty simple really.

All I have to do now is figure out how to save an image from my flash movie onto the server and it is proving to be much more difficult.  Actionscript continues to suck hours away from my life.
I'll see if I can find a better example than the one I am using now but the comments say this is a good one.  It is just the way the author intertwined a bunch of his class files.  It is very frusterating and I am getting a class location error and I cannot find a reason.

But I did get the php part working so little progress there.

Oh, hey! it's mid-term.

Spent time this last week trying to get the e-mail working.  We actually spent nearly 2 hours of class time figuring out how to get it done.

originally, I was using this code http://designreviver.com/tutorials/actionscript-3-jpeg-encoder-revealed-saving-images-from-flash/
But that was not quite working.  The reason we figured was because the PHP was not actually doing much of anything but trying to echo the JPG created in flash.

Now the working theory is that I should have the actionscript create a JPG or image that will be saved onto the server.  Then I will create some php that will take that image and send it out to an email.  Easy as could be right?

here is a big ol' collection of links.

http://ntt.cc/2009/01/09/as3corelib-tutorialhow-to-use-jpegencoder-and-pngencoder-class-in-flex.html

http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.imagick.php   or also try GD?

http://email.about.com/od/emailprogrammingtips/qt/How_to_Send_Email_from_a_PHP_Script.htm



http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4635820/as3-save-media-file-to-server

http://ask.amoeba.co.in/save-images-from-flash-actionsctipt-3-filereference-save-jpgencoder/

http://www.quietless.com/kitchen/upload-bitmapdata-snapshot-to-server-in-as3/

http://www.webcheatsheet.com/PHP/send_email_text_html_attachment.php#attachment






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So over mid-term I will hopefully get that working over break.  I also plan on improving things from a visual point of view over the week. 

*fingers crossed that things work well enough.