sakri rosenstrom blog

This is the final posting about my presentation at multimania (sniff sniff), and I’ve saved the best for last… The idea is nothing new, a text, which either comes together from pieces, or explodes into pieces… I made one at nascom for a Belgian radio station called Donna a few years back… Pigs Farting, right up my alley


seems there is still a version online

I wrote a flash based “fart text generator”, where I could create letters by adding and removing bubbles, dragging them around and eventually storing an entire alphabet in xml… this was then referenced by the animation, and fart text was born… took a good 5 days to make the “text generator” if memory serves me…

I came up with an automated way to do this (though I must disclaim that someone has probably done this before, as always). The idea is to grab a snapshot (bitmapdata) of a textfield, using a Matrix transformation to shrink it… When the bitmap data is small enough, a “for loop” can grab all the pixels which are not transparent (using getPixel() ) . These are stored in an array, which in turn can be used to place “the pieces”. With the speed increases in flash player 9 this happens acceptably fast. Works for any font (download the source and change the font if you don’t believe me).

here it is (Make sure you have sound on!):

The riveting batman text effect!

Click to see the text explode (and sound thunder), right click to view source (or click here

I have a bunch of ideas to use this for… bleeding text, smoking text, burning text… if any of my infinite fan-club members decides to use this technique, be sure to post here about it

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 9:05 pm and is filed under AS3, Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.