UnitZeroOne

Another oldskool effect! This technique is called bumpmapping and produces lightened heightmapped and textured images. I’m very happy about how this one looks, but even more on how I got to this. I needed to generate a static bumpmap for another thing I’m working on, and got kind of distracted doing it. I thought it would be a cool thing to do in Flash 8.5, and maybe build myself a little Flex 2 interface along the way.

While coding this in 8.5, it started out as a very mathematically correct (and thus non optimized) version of the basic 2d BumpMapping algorithm. Slowly I noticed that I could maybe do it per pixel, and fast enough to run frame by frame. While optimizing it to run faster, (Miko also put in some effort here) I came to the conclusion that the optimized routine looked amazingly much like a Convolution Filter creating displacement lookups. And what do you know; it is. So I ended up being able to creatie this 8 version of the effect The algorithm itself is very well documented, so I won’t go into that.

The 8.5 per-pixel version takes about 50% CPU (I’m still struggling with some perfomance issues I have with beta 2, how can it be that one (bitshifting) array lookup is slower then 4 getpixels?). Although it is to be expected that that can be reduced, it will never reacht he 5% load this thing gives on my CPU, producing the exact same result. Filters are sooo much fun.

The example shows 2 different combinations of lightmaps, bumpmaps and texture maps (UnitZeroOne and V for Vendetta). It’s the most basic implementation of what the thing could look like. Imagine using animated bump and light maps….

Here’s the example.
[UPDATE]
I’ve taken the sources offline until a reach my workstation again, since I made an error while exporting the project out of FDT. Sorry. Will post them again as soon as possible. Thank you Jens for the tip.
[UPDATE2]
And the sources are available, this time correct.

Preview picture of the now pimped & bumpmapped uzo icon :

(You will need the Flash 8 plugin!)