The Mesh Tool

By Bobby on Thu, 1 Jan 2009 08:37:09 +0000

The Mesh Tool is a web based utility that allows you to create drawings through Bezier curves based on a set of user defined control points. This set of points can be exported and used in a variety of ways.
To use the data exported in this manner in a flash movie you can use the Mesh component that is available for download on the left side of this page.

Implementation

This tool is implemented with Flash 8 and makes use of the method curveTo() to draw quadratic Bezier curves. Quadratic Bezier curves are defined by two endpoints and a single control point. Below is an example of quadratic and cubic Bezier curves:

The mesh component available for download reads the array points exported by the Mesh Tool and uses them to generate a replica of the original drawing. The mesh component provides the following methods: Mesh.prototype.draw() - draws the object defined by the set of points Mesh.prototype.setPoints(pnts) - sets pnts (an array) as the point data source. Generates a call to draw(). Mesh.prototype.getPoints() - get the array of points. Mesh.prototype.setPoint(i, xc, yc) - set the coordinate of point i. Mesh.prototype.getPoint(p) - get point i. Mesh.prototype.setThicknessn(t) - set thickness of curves. Mesh.prototype.getThickness() - get thickness of curves.

Information & Acknowledgements

The current release version for the Mesh Tool is 0.1 which means it is only an initial draft at this stage. I created this application to help me in the building of an animation for my graphics class. I hope to develop it further.
The image above is taken from the Macromedia Livedocs curveTo() reference.

Demo animation with control & anchor points

Below is a shark animation built with the Mesh Tool. The mesh for each frame of the animation was created manually from an actual shark image. The mesh array for each frame was then exported and fed to the Mesh Component which steps through the frames, drawing the respective lines. The control and anchor points have been left in for demonstration purposes.

The The Mesh Tool article by Bobby Soares, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

No comments have been added.

(see all) web service, tile engine, google docs, flash, window, penn, pixel, python, game, compiler, server, tlslite, token, reference, rtmp, vmware, p vs np, Google Docs, poweredge, javascript, component, vbulletin, proxy, networking, vmware esxi, GData, forum, plugin, gwt, outlook, scales, puzzle, GWT, java, attach, shining force, subsets, appengine, permutations, pong, authentication, roland, screenshot, np-complete, gdata, neural net, php, latex, audio, AppEngine