Once in a while though, we do it. So Flash Builder 4 is finally available ! The pricing is around the same as the previous version, Flex Builder 3. $250 for the standard version and $700 for the premium.

Among the huge improvements in the Flash workflow, the data-centric, skinning and styling features are just what we needed. Have a look at the grid of features for more details.

Flash Catalyst wasn’t mentioned anywhere but I guess it will be part of the CS5 release. Until then you can still play around with Catalyst beta 2.

Talking about buzz-like news, Adobe made a countdown for the CS5 launch with a wooden font. Now 16 days : 01 hours : 08 minutes : 21 seconds. You got that much time to buy a new 64-bit computer for After Effects CS5. Yes, Adobe asks you to contribute to the rampant consumerism. What will your answer be ?

Say you got a nice shiny Flex project with Locales and internationalization all around. You want to transfer the whole project to another developer’s workspace on another machine. The target has got a fresh Flex Builder install, nothing customized and all. You import your project within the workspace and everything’s fine EXCEPT Flex Builder starts yelling about its inability to open a Locale (in this case a Frog).

A quick google-pet-sniffing tells the poor target that he has to run a script on DOS or on the Terminal to copy a bunch of files (see Adobe labs and Herreman’s article). Fine, he’s got a French locale. So he goes on the Flex Builder again which is still yelling with a deadly cross. First thing you do : close the project and re-open it. Second : close Flex and re-open it. Third : close the computer and re-open it. Fourth : close the office and…(what would you do next ?)

I’ll save you a couple of minutes here. The only solution is to kill the project, delete it (not the files, just the project) and import it anew. And THAT WORKS ! Don’t ask me why.

It happened to us a few times, not only in this case but on some other configurations where Flex Builder shows PTSD symptoms and still wants to display a white on red cross when everything’s fine. Here, the fact that we imported the project after the modification fixed something. But sometimes you haven’t done anything like that and Flex Builder (or I’d rather say Eclipse) is stuck in a state with your project. Just create it again even if it’s a hassle.

By the way, it’s not limited to the Flex Builder. Flash got similar problems sometimes. Like you want to save a class and compile but nothing looks like the changes were applied, except your file IS saved. You’d have to recreate an .fla and it’d work.

The Answer

That’s about the same solution as kicking a device to make it work properly again. I can’t wait to see in the next bad movie a hacker closing the project and importing it again. “Haha look at that !”. He might not look as cool as beating an engine in a spatial module with a wrench (remember Armageddon, that risible movie ?) but given what you can see in blockbusters, I say, why not ?

Toxic snow contaminates the AIR

Or is it the other way around ?

We recently put to use the feature of dynamic pdf loading in AIR and we met a little problem. If you try to open a pdf document within the HTMLLoader on a MacOSX Snow Leopard, your application miserably crashes. I’m surprised I didn’t find much information but a few forum threads about this.

Random fact n°2401 : snow leopards do eat anything you throw at them

You can read about it on google groups but you won’t find any clue to a solution whatsoever. Doing what Hitomi Kudo from the AIR team advises doesn’t change anything.

The problem either comes from Adobe air + pdf or from Snow Leopard. There were many changes under the hood of Snow Leopard. The after effects were quite similar to the release of Vista. A lot of things didn’t work and required new drivers and blabla. So I wouldn’t be surprised Adobe didn’t see this one coming. — Just like Apple’s sly attempts to avoid the Flash Player on the iPhone — (subliminal message).

Still we’re stuck with this problem and there is no way to display a pdf in an air application under snow leopard.

We also tried an advice on this post on the adobe forum without success. It basically says you should add “file://” when you call a file on MacOSX.


Alpha…ville

It is only natural that you would enable the alpha on your application so that your rounded borders or whatever look nice. Well forget that if you intend to use pdf documents ! Enabling the alpha on the application level is cause to so many issues that it reminds me of the “transparent wmode” beast to avoid at all cost on websites. This isn’t the web though. Perhaps if we shout all together at once “we want alpha”, some Adobe developers will hear us wherever they lurk.

WE-WANT-ALPHA ! *pretty please !*

Überlays

To complete the picture, we found yet another annoying bug. In the same configuration, an air application with a pdf within an htmlloader, the htmlloader is masking everything that should be on top of it. So if you have a combobox just over your htmlloader, try and click on the combobox and the panel which expends down will be masked, as if it were in a lesser child index than the htmlloader instance. What a drag.

Integrating the PDF reader into AIR does seem to be a huge task for the amount of bugs we get with each update…

How about AIR 1.5.4 ? or AIR 2.0 ? Let us be patient.

In an undergoing project, we needed at some point an array of 96*16 (not a zillion) meshes, simple ones as they are. So I happily used the Array tool, cloning en masse. As Max started to cough, I saw a repetitive pattern of the pre-crash effect. Nothing I could do to save him. And even when there was no crash, the UI was utterly slow.

Purokushi

I lookep up solutions about handling lots of meshes at once and I found mrProxy to be exactly what I needed. This article on cgsociety talks about the new features of Max 2010 and shows a little what you can do with mrProxy and huge forests in architectural renders. It is definitely a great thing like the Architectural Mats and Pro Mats that the article mentions. The thing is however, proxies are nothing new. I don’t really know why they talk about it as a new feature here. Perhaps the fact it is “new” is that it is shipped with Max…

If you’re on VRay, there are also vRayProxies but let’s talk about Mental Ray Proxies here.

Generally speaking, a proxy is a kind of portal, a gateway you must pass through in order to use some resource or produce something.

In networking that’d be to use a connection with the advantage of security and disadvantage of slower speed depending on where your proxy is physically located.

In programming, a proxy is often thought as a design pattern and implemented as a communicator with some data source for instance, you don’t deal directly with the data source but use proxies instead.

Metal type models in the early printing, a proxy you can take in your hand !

In 3D, there are several kinds of proxies too. By default, Max has a bitmap proxy feature in the rendering options but let’s talk about mrProxy which is here an object like any other you can use on your scene.

mrProxy is a temporary replacement for your mesh on the scene. That helps to save some precious memory that mental ray won’t feed upon, hungry as it is.

What the proxy does is, it represents your model with a cloud of vertices, not too many so as not to slow the Max UI and you handle it in place of the real model. So you can replicate thousands or more instances of the mrProxy and Max is less of a slug.

Meshes, unite !

A few things to note. A Proxy by default doesn’t have the same material as the model, it doesn’t have any in fact. You might want to shift textures from one proxy to another to make them look different. Don’t worry about your uvw mapping and material ids, they’re all working as if it were the real model. So you can apply the same material from the model to the proxy without worries.

Now a very important thing : you can’t make a proxy out of a group or whatever container it might be. That’s too bad and it will force you to clone your model and make it into one single mesh. Fortunately, Max handles the material ids pretty well.

Another thing you might wonder, proxies work with any kind of mesh, nurbs comprised.

So if for instance you have two multi-sub materials, each made of several materials, you’ll often have two series of material ids starting from 1. Let’s say you got a model of a human cyborg whose left arm is a robot, the rest is all weak human flesh. For some reasons, you have made the human as a poly and the robot arm as a nurbs. Either you’ll choose to make two proxies, for the body and arm, or you’ll convert the nurbs mesh to a poly mesh and attach it to the body.

Then you got a “human” multi-mat made of

1. skin
2. eyes
3. mouth

And another multi-mat, say “cyborg”,

1. shiny metal
2. plastic

There’s obviously a material id conflict if you are to merge your meshes together.

If you’d want to make a single mesh out of all this, you’d first clone the whole joe, turn the poly into a mesh and attach the robot arm to the flesh body. Max in all his wisdom would then ask you how you want to manage the material ids, the first option is your best choice as it will reassign the material ids of, say, the robot arm so that the parts of the arm whose material ids are 1 don’t look like skin.

Here’s a sample gengon in action with two materials. The red vertices are the multiple proxy clones.

Dollies

When your base mesh is ready, you only need to write it onto an external .mib file using this panel below.

To access it, you need to create a new mrProxy instance and place it on the scene.

The mrProxy panel

After the file browser, you’re prompted with these parameters.

mrProxy write to file box

In still mode, you need to write only one temporary file that your proxy will refer to. If you want your proxy to replicate some kind of animation, you’ll need to write all the animation’s frames into temporary files. So yes, you’ll have to update your proxies if you decide to modify the animation of the model.

Vertex and topology animations are supported by mrProxy so that covers most of your needs.

I observed a little problem with the scaling of imported meshes. It doesn’t happen all the time and is in fact quite rare but if you don’t see your proxy either in the UI or in the render, it’s often because of a too low scale value in the proxy.

So here’s what it looks like, having many proxy instances of your mesh on the scene. Looks messy but at least it’s fast in the UI.

Vertices cloud of your replicas

All this renders at a decent speed, it’s a matter of a few minutes with the default mental ray params.

Rendered proxies

What’s more ?

A list of some scripts that might or might not help you on scriptspot.com

A nice utility called Proxy Painter on 3rdpole.com, it works both with VRay and Mental Ray.

A good intro to mrProxy is available on hagerman.com.

Anyway, I figured I’d use a NetStream to load the m4a song. My google pet told me there were other helpless people asking how to pull a SoundChannel out of a NetStream but it doesn’t seem to be the way to do it.

The answer is rather simple but its implementation is a bit weird :

var ba:ByteArray;
//computeSpectrum(output:ByteArray, FFTMode:Boolean=false, stretchFactor:int=0)
SoundMixer.computeSpectrum(ba);

Basically you’ll need to start the usual NetConnection and NetStream stuff, grab your song and listen on ENTER_FRAME events to analyze the sound spectrum with this method.

Here’s what the doc says about it :

Takes a snapshot of the current sound wave and places it into the specified ByteArray object. The values are formatted as normalized floating-point values, in the range –1.0 to 1.0. The ByteArray object passed to the outputArray parameter is overwritten with the new values. The size of the ByteArray object created is fixed to 512 floating-point values, where the first 256 values represent the left channel, and the second 256 values represent the right channel.

If you want to use this bytearray as a source for a spectrum visualizer, you’ll have to experiment doing some maths and bitwise calculations, all that in some loops. Using ba.readFloat() will give you the next value in the byte array. So your loop will likely perform 512 (or 256 if you only want one channel) iterations to use all the values of the spectrum.

This method of analyzing the sound spectrum on the fly has two major weaknesses :

1. if you got multiple sounds playing, you can’t tell them apart with this method as it gives you a spectrum for all the sounds together.
2. if you intend to use it for serious sound applications, you’ll want to enable FFT (using a Fourier transformation) and the calculation will generate a noticeable lag, making your analyzer appear unsynchronized, late.

Luckily for us and in most applications, the sound spectrum is meant as a visual entertainment, nothing more.

There’s a very good sample on todaycreate.com with insightful comments in case you don’t really know where to start.

Additional and detailed explanations are available on the Flex 3 language reference.

A great thing however, is the way you can get a lot of information on an m4a input. There are three events currently supported :

• onTextData gives you the current text of the playing m4a. It could be anything and in our case it’s the name of the current track.
• onImageData gives you the current image of the podcast. Just like the texts, the image can change if your podcast got chapters.
• onMetaData is important to get the duration of the stream. Additionally, the event object tells you of a lot of things about the stream like the sample rate, the channels, the tags, etc.

Depending on how the m4a is documented by the podcast creator and the software one’s using, you could even chapterize a podcast in order to get something similar to cue points in the chapters property in the metadata. You won’t get everything you want though. I would have appreciated to get a list of all the text data and their seek time but you can’t get them beforehand. You must play the stream in order to get the events one by one so if you really need a list of the “text points” (they aren’t cue points), you’ll have to make one manually…

I thought I’d make it a post as I haven’t found decisive information on the net.

So we had a few choices :

1. export to another exchange format like .igs (set to NURBS at export-time)
2. play your luck with an .stl (stereolitho file)
3. bet your money on a plugin that will take care of the import of the STEP

In the end, it all comes down to two main ideas :

• either work with nurbs
• or convert them into poly meshes with a lot of faces to match the curves

Just to make it clear, in CAD, models are based on splines, b-splines and all the joyous family. 3DSMax and Maya have always sucked at handling nurbs. Isn’t that great ?

Now, you don’t have to read all that’s written below if you haven’t had problems before. The best way to have a proper model from CAD is to handle it in nurbs. If possible at all, avoid converting it to a poly mesh because most likely, it will lack some faces  here and there and what’s more, the tesselation will damage the look of the curves of your original model. Additionally, converting the nurbs model to a poly mesh won’t make it any faster to manipulate in the 3D UI and the wireframe of a nurbs model looks much simpler than with a poly mesh.

1. IGS and the likes

IGS is similar to STEP as they are both based on curves. The latter is a bit better as it keeps the hierarchy and original names of the objects, which is a handy feature when you got complex models. I can’t provide you with screenshots here as the guy from the CAD company (too) early dismissed IGS as being a hindrance in Maya (even though in this case we’re on Max…). Nevertheless, the point is not about the format itself but about the kind of model you get. IGS is a good option if you don’t want to use a STEP importer though I haven’t been able to import a test model to see if there could be some compatibility issues or things that might make your dear Max go haywire.

2. Stereolitho

Talk about stereolitho and you look like the professional out there. Shorts for stereolithography, it is just a “3d printing” technique that uses layering of resin cut by lasers to shape an object. An importer exists for this format in Max so why not try it ?

From what I found here and there, information was a bit contradictory. Some people posted tutorials about how to import IGS files without saying anything about would-be problems and some other people talked about how you’d better stick to stereolitho exports (raving about the so-called “chord height”). Importing files from Solidworks or ProE to Max seems as obscure as back alley in the outskirts of a big city by a freezing night.

Let’s take a sample, a tutorial from the year 2000 (I haven’t found many of them which look recent) called “Solidworks to 3DSMax”. The tutorial is all nice and easy but when you get to the last part, the rendering that is, you may be disappointed a little. If you look at the reflections and refractions on the tyre, you’ll notice some jagged, unnatural reflections. Not good.

But nothing beats doing it yourself. So did I. The model was slightly more complex than the wheel in cadmonkey’s tutorial and look at the result :

STL input with the standard Max importer

Eewww. The poly mesh has more than 70000 faces but it’s all ugly. This export was done using a chord height of 0.2 mm (around 0.008″), all the other parameters are the same as in the monkey’s tutorial. Even with the “coarse” export option, you could believe that you’d only have to apply a turbosmooth (or meshsmooth) once the “lowpoly” is imported in Max BUT it is not so easy. If you do that, you will have to set manually every smoothing group on your mesh and the final model will look different than the one made in surfaces because you cannot rely on a meshsmooth to make the same curves as the original surfaces.

By the way, there’s a very powerful trick to increases the amount of faces in your mesh while smoothing it slightly. It’s an option concealed in the ProBoolean modifier (made by…nPowerSoftware) called the Quad Tesselation. Here’s what it looks like applied to the ugly mesh above :

Attempt to fix the STL import

You can still see some bizarre cuts on the borders of some curves and holes so this trick isn’t enough to correct the bad tesselation I had to begin with.

Perhaps STL is fit for CAD model printing but it’s better to look for another exchange format in this case.

3. Plugins at your service

From this point on, we’re looking at commercial solutions.

The main software companies who are into import/export plugins for Max (and Maya) are nPower Software and Okino. From an outsider’s perspective, nPower looks more professional with their website but also ten times as much expensive as Okino’s solution. I can’t help but notice Okino’s web site features about all the kinds of bad clichés in web design with the fonts, the old 1999 photoshop effects *bow to the bevel filter*, kind of “geek welcome for math lovers”. That aside, it isn’t necessarily representative of the quality of their software at all.

3.1. nPowerSoftware plugins

If you install both nPower Power Translator Pro and Okino Polytrans plugins for Max (v. 2010 here), you’ll notice a slight difference in the way you have to import a model. With Power Translator, it’s quite easy, you go to File > Import > Import and in the drop down list there’s a few extra formats handled by npwr.

nPower Translator STEP importer panel

Upon choosing your STEP file, you get a little config menu and what is really cool with this plugin is that it’s not limited to an import procedure. It adds a modifier on top of all the imported models with a ton of customizable parameters so you really have control of the model you import. Can’t do better than that for now.

nPower Special Nurbs modifier

Look at the smooth and clean result !

Shaded view of the imported STEP model — nPowerSoftware’s Translator Pro

Wireframe of the imported STEP model — nPowerSoftware’s Translator Pro

3.2. Okino’s plugins

Okino Polytrans’s way of importing is less simple. The way the plugin works is kind of old-fashioned (like their site, aw… forgive me). You have to go to the utility panel and load the Polytrans I/O. Then you got a big list of various formats and as soon as you select one, a browser pops up, asking for a file. So you feed the little animal with a STEP file and another panel appears with two main options : beginner or expert mode. A good thing because the “chord height” and such terms could scare some people who aren’t into CAD. The problem is, even when you boost things and ask for the best quality for the import, I ended up with a poly mesh that looks like our so-called swiss cheese, the holes looking a bit triangular…

STEP cheesy import — Okino PolyTrans plugin

I gave it several attempts and even used the built-in import of raw ProE models which lead nowhere.

ProE “scratched” import — Okino PolyTrans plugin

I even tried to import the infamous stereolitho model…

STL garbage — Okino PolyTrans plugin

Perhaps Okino should increase their pricing in order to provide a truly functional plugin…I do hope that other people had a better experience with this plugin than I had.

Another solution would be to use the 3D standalone software PolyTrans, load the exported model into it, re-export into another format like .obj or .fbx and load all that into Max. Not viable in my opinion.

4. Conclusion

The huge difference between nPower’s way and Okino’s way is that the former uses Nurbs and the latter converts everything to poly meshes so it is more prone to errors. This case isn’t representative of all cases so it might happen to you that Polytrans is a good tool. Here, it just doesn’t do the job.

No surprise here, nPowerSoftware’s plugins stand out in terms of quality. The downside to all this is the cost of the solution : between $1000 to $3000 if you need Power Translator Univ. That is however the best solution available right now for Max and it is available for Maya as well.

After three years of steady growth, we’re now able to go full speed ahead.

We have therefore moved in our new office in the center Le Flon of Lausanne. What’s more, we’ve recruited an experimented graphic designer, Julien Palmilha, and we expect to grow our staff steadily over the coming years.

Among a lot of interesting projects, we’re working on our new website. Unlike the current one, it will feature all our references, products and documentation. Nothing fancy or unseen before. This is simply a necessary step.

From now on, we will also keep this blog alive as we have much to share with the community.

2010 is going to be dyed in Noir.

At that time, Sean Corfield wrote a good summary of Thermo.

Starting with a Photoshop PSD file, Thermo imported this and converted it to MXML. Design elements can then be selected and with a simple right-click they can be converted from artwork to Flex controls. The automatic inference of design-time data sets so you could test UI interactions with “real” data was very impressive.

Mark Anders, vice president of engineering for Adobe, also told this.

Thermo, which is in the early stages of development, is built on the Flex Builder development environment, a tool the company already offers to help bridge the gap between developers and designers. Flex provides workflows developers can recognize to render visual parts of the application so it’s easier for them to add visual elements to an RIA. Designers using Thermo don’t have to write code for their applications, but they can choose to view the source code and see it in a Flex Builder editor that they can work with if they want to, Anders said.

Rejoice (should we ?) for it is called Thermo no more. From now on, it’s Adobe Catalyst. The name isn’t bad considering it will speed up project developments (hopefully !).

Waiting for the release, you can already drool over the video that Adobe published on their Labs website.

As it seems focused on Flex, I wonder what will become of Flash itself as Catalyst will fill the gap between graphic designers and flex developers but not between graphic designers and flash developers.

An early release of Catalyst was available to those attending MAX at San Fransico but it’s still gone public. You can signup on Labs if you want to be noticed of the release.

For more concrete samples, go take a look at the Catalyst team blog.

Adobe, with it’s recent “open mania”, has lifted the SWF (and FLV) format specifications and created the Open Screen project on the fly to help Adobe increase the Flash Player embedding into various devices (anything with a screen basically). Following this, Adobe has been working in cooperation with Google in order to make Flash more indexable by search engines.

Pros

Google was given a special version of the Flash Player so that its indexing robots could retrieve data directly from a SWF. The player just behaves like a standard human user and accesses data, writes it in a comprehensive robot-language and gives it back to the robot. So Googlebot is now able to crawl dynamic data !

Soon Yahoo will follow in the venture and probably other vendors as well.

Here are a few articles you’ll want to read :

• Google Webmaster Central Blog : improved Flash indexing
• Adobe’s article : SWF Searchability FAQ
  
• Adobe press release : enhanced search results for RIA

Google sums it up with this short news :

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets.

Cons

Ron Adler and Janis Stipins from Google relieve the designers :

Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability.

So they say. Oh wait. Perhaps it’s not that simple. There are two important problems. Ron and Janis said there are still three technical limitations, two of them being the following.

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

If you’re a Flash designer, you’ll immediately think of SWFObject which is actually based on Javascript. Lots of Flash web sites use it. We don’t know whether it is of a type that won’t be executed by Googlebot.

2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.

It is a major problem because a lot of ActionScript developers use a light SWF files that loads the rest of the application on demand. Sections are often broken down into several modules, sometimes meant for re-usability (an Object Oriented convenience).

Searchability

Andrea Hill wrote some interesting thoughts on this topic.

Another major challenge in opening applications up to search is being able to direct the searcher to the relevant section within the experience.

I couldn’t agree more with that. There is a huge difference between RIAs and HTML in that the RIAs aren’t accessible automatically, you have to decide what is to be accessible. Adobe’s answer is in the SWF Searchability FAQ (listed above) :

To generate URLs at runtime that reflect the specific state of SWF content or RIA, developers can use Adobe Flex components that will update the location bar of a browser window with the information that is needed to reconstruct the state of the application.

For complex sites that have a finite number of entry points, you can highlight the specific URLs to a search spider using techniques such as site map XML files. Even for sites that use a single SWF, you can create multiple HTML files that provide different variables to the SWF and start your application at the correct subsection. By creating multiple entry points, you can get the benefits of a site that is indexed as a suite of pages but still only need to manage one copy of your application. For more information on deep-linking best practices, visit www.sitemaps.org/faq.php.

With all this in mind, it is not safe yet to think Flash web sites will be indexed easily. Google is already working on the limitations of the Googlebot and I’m looking forward to hearing news of their progresses.

Update on 23 July 2008 : “Reserve your tickets today. Early-bird tickets to Singularity are just $99 USD (inc. VAT) until the end of August.”

A site teaser has been released some days ago on Google app engine. As Aral wrote :

You can sign up for the site, which will go live in July, and register your interest in the conference[…]

Even though it’s a web conference, it does not mean it’ll be free. The attendees will have to buy tickets that will be on sale on July 1, 2008 with the launch of the new site. The pricing is still unknown but Aral said it’s affordable.

Can’t make a certain session? No worries, it’s all recorded. And attendees have exclusive access to the sessions for six months, at which time the recordings for the 2008 conference will be released under a Creative Commons license for the benefit of all and to form a time capsule defining Web ’08 as presented by our amazing line-up of speakers.

If you want to hear some words of him, the Télévision Suisse interviewed Aral while he was attending the LIFT conference some months ago.