If you’ve been working your way through my book then you may find the content in the following video familiar. As part of a series of articles I’m writing for Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine, I decided to revisit the underwater bubbles scene from my Flash iOS Apps Cookbook. However, whereas the cookbook focusses on Flash’s native display list and its GPU rendering mode, I thought this time I’d show you how to make something similar using the Starling framework.
The tutorial actually targets the Flash desktop player but I thought it would be fun to spend a little time adding some additional motion to the bubbles and quickly deploy it to iPad. As you can see it turned out quite well. It may not be easy to spot, but if you look at the bubbles in the video you’ll notice that they very subtly animate as they move. In fact there’s over 200 frames of animation for each bubble that were very kindly animated and rendered by my brother. It’s always handy to have a family member who’s an expert at 3D animation and modelling.
Anyway if you’d like to try building this simple bubbles demo yourself using ActionScript 3 and Starling then look out for April’s edition of Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine. In fact I’ll let you guys know when it’s available. Oh and sorry about the extremely shaky camera hand.