Neil Petrick

By VengantMjolnir  on Thu 10 of Dec., 2009 00:20 PST

I gave it a lot of thought, and I've decided to make my lighting stuff open source. However, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it right. So I'm going to create a series of tutorials to go along with my stuff. My reasoning behind this decision is quite simple really, I want to give back to the community I've been a part of for a while now. I've learned so much from so many sources that offered up help, tutorials or samples. Now its time I provided something someone else can use.

As a taste, I'm going to put up the roadmap for the first set of tutorials. I'll update as I get more of the tutorials put online. I trust that I leave you seriously enticed.

Dynamic Shadows in Flash AS3

The aim here is to provide a set of tutorials on how to create dynamic shadows in flash using Action Script 3. I hope to give back to the flash community in some way. I have learned a ton over the years from many places, places that offered both source code and instruction on how to implement it.

Tutorial Roadmap

1. Development Environment
   • Setting up FlashDevelop and a simple package structure. Feel free to skip if you are not a beginner.
2. Blend Modes in AS3
   • A quick talk about blend modes and how these can help use to help fake shadows and light.
3. Lights, pushing back the shadow
   • What is a light? This tutorial focuses on how light is actually the absence of darkness, and how this is a good thing.
4. Shadow Casters
   • This is a long one, so buckle up. Here we go through the drawing of shadow caster vector shapes. These are used to erase parts of the light. Bring your math skills.
5. Optimizations Part One
   • Using Box2D to pair casters and lights. You could substitue your own broadphase here.
6. Optimizations Part Two
   • Caching shadow geometry for non-moving casters.