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Erik Natzke - new hero

August 05th, 2007

I heard a lot about Erik Natzke way back in flash 5 days. He had a really intersting experimental showcase site. I remember his work was massively respected. Then he disappeared - his site went down and I didn’t hear much about him. So the other day I stumbled over a video of his at FITC in 06.
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-1458352919661594741&q=fitc
This guy is a true master of the flash meduim and is always pushing it to it’s limits. His work was on his site for a while but now it redirects to his blog:
http://jot.eriknatzke.com/

I loved his swarms and ribbons. So I tried to replicate:
swarm_1
swarm_2
ribbon

2 Comments so far

  1. Daniel Iregui October 5th, 2007 5:07 am

    Hi Rob,

    I’m working in an app in flash which requires that I join dots with ribbon-like shapes. I ‘ve been playing with the Catmull Rom curve to achieve this and I now have a cool shapen. But I can’t figure out how to fill the ribbon with color. How do you manage this with your ribbons?

  2. admin October 7th, 2007 10:03 pm

    Daniel,

    Catmull Rom curve - nice one!
    Seriously, getting the curves to be tangent is the hard part. The ribbon isn’t too hard. I followed Natske’s lead and drew the ribbon as a series of sections between two lines/curves. The ribbon is created by drawing fills inbetween the two lines. More of a tape worm than a ribbon, but the effect is there.

    Goto the 30 minute mark of the video above to see how Natske did it.

    Rob

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