This week the Jay Jays Jayvatar Builder that Visual Jazz created went live. It’s a cool little tool that lets you create your own custom avatar for use on the Jay Jays site.
Whith a very unique style and heaps of options you are sure to create some very cooky characters.
A few months back, Visual Jazz (the place I work) was building a new site for Visy called Visy Enviromaniacs. The purpose of the site was to help educate children about the environment, teaching them about recycling, saving energy, etc.
To help make the learning for fun and keep the kids interested, a major section of the site was a series of mini games with a planet saving theme. It was my job to build those games… I love my job 
Read on to hear about the games, and then check them out at VISY Enviromaniacs.
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Did you ever get the feeling that you were being tested? That’s what happened to me with this site. The designers I work with at Visual Jazz really like to push us developers some times.
When I first saw the designs for it I remember saying to myself ‘Gosh darn! How is one supposed to go about doing that??’ (I may have used some more colourful language but you get the jist) I had never done 3D before, and that was just the beginning. There was depth of field, keyed out video, and a pile of information to be displayed.
Luckily, it all came together in the end – you can read about how in this post.
Sometimes in this line of work someone gives you a job that is nothing but fun.
Visual Jazz was rebuilding the entire Baker’s Delight website, and as a bit of a side project we were given the task of building a virtual bakery in Flash. The bakery was to be a high gloss virtual representation of one of their stores, allowing visitors to browse through a sample selection of their products.
It was a simple project with a pretty cool looking result. Read on to find out some of the features, and then check it out at http://www.bakersdelight.com.au/virtual.html.
Working at Visual Jazz does expose me to some interesting scenarios/ I mean, playing with dolls for a couple of weeks isn’t my usual idea of a good time, but this funky little microsite had some pretty cool features that had my brain ticking over the whole time.
Some interesting 3D modelling and animation coupled with my first attempt augmented reality in flash made for some puzzling times. Drench all that in a healthy dose of girly-ness and you get www.livinmyworld.com.au.
Read on to find out more some of the more nerdy details
Colorado is tough at work and at play. Thats the idea behind this microsite that I helped build at Visual Jazz. The whole thing was built in flash and oozed manliness from start to finish.
It was my job to do all the flash programming to make this site come to life.
Read on to hear me ramble on a bit more about some of the details.
Recently I did some work on the a project that required me to use some Displacement Maps. I have never used them before, but after playing with them for a bit I soon realised something… they are very awesome.
They do take a little bit of getting used to, so to help with the experimentation I created this little app that makes it easy to test out different image and maps combinations.
Working at Visual Jazz I tend to get to involved with some pretty cool Holden projects – a lot of which are flash based microsites.
One of those sites was for the Holden Epica.
Built entirely in flash, I was responsible for coding most of this site. In comparison to some of the other websites I’ve worked on it wasn’t very big, but it did come up looking pretty cool with a very cool / clean look that I really liked.
Read on to get a bit of a spiel and then check it out at here.
I’m by no means an expert on Regular Expressions. I mean, I get what they do, and can see their awesomeness, but damn they do my head in sometimes.
To help myself out, I wrote a quick little Flex app that lets you test how a regular expression will work with a particular string. It lets you try out all the Flash Regular Expression methods and see each of the results.
To top it all off, I put together a quick overview of the different Flash Regular Expression methods that are available, as well as a short overview of the Regular Expression syntax.
You can check it all out right here…
A while back I was given my first flash project that required me to use Papervision 3D. If that wasn’t daunting enough, the design of the project required that there be a depth of field effect on the elements – something that papervision cannot do. (If i am wrong about that, please don’t tell me now…)
After learning the basics of papervision – which has plenty of tutorials on the interwebs – I started brainstorming an approach for faking depth of field. Here is what I came up with.