correspondence with Maxwell Langdon

For one of my idents I need to use some actionscript on flash to make the water look as though it is moving. I found a useful website called 'pixelhivedesign' and a flash tutorial for water.

http://www.pixelhivedesign.com/tutorials/Realistic+Flash+Water+Effect/

Unfortunately when i tried to apply it to my animation, there was a severe delay in the playback, so I emailed him with the query and here is a copy of our correspondence;


16 November 2009 at 12:04
Dear Maxwell,

I recently used your 'realistic flash water' tutorial, and while the example worked fine, when I tried to apply it to my own animation the playback speed was very slow. I've tried changing the fps and resizing the actionscript and image to no avail.

Can you think of a reason why this may be happening?
-Michelle



16 November 2009 at 14:29
Hi Michelle,

Mind sending me the compiled Flash .swf or even the .fla, so I can see what is happening on the Stage. You were right to try and resize the effect, it is cpu intensive. However, you said it didn't help so must be something else.

Regards,
Maxwell Langdon
Pixel Hive Design - Professional Web Development & Graphic Design
http://www.pixelhivedesign.com



Nov 16, 2009 at 15:56
Thank you for the fast response!

I've attached the flash file, hope it helps. I was also trying to find away to make the 'bottom logo' and 'dragon' layers have the water effect on them, is that possible?

Anyway, thank you again!
-Michelle



16 November 2009 at 16:25:34
Hi Michelle,

I did two things. The main thing was you had the effect applied to an area of 720x800. I changed the 800 to 388, the size of the reflection:
myBitmap = new BitmapData(720,388,false,0);

The second thing I did was add a few lines of code to allow the effect to be paused. I pause the effect during the scroll up animation since you don't really notice the effect anyway during the scroll and it is also hard on the cpu to scroll and animate the effect. I unpause it when it's done scrolling. You can see how I pause it on the "water" layer on the main timeline. Look at the actionscript on the frame when you begin and end the scroll animation.

Animation looks good on my computer now.

Maxwell Langdon

---

I have since been able to complete that ident bringing my total of completed idents up to 4. So far I am on schedule but I'll need to finish the other two by friday and then worry about properly updating this blog. I've also completed the final background for the idents;



Till then!
-Michelle