Burswood - Eve

Finally! I have been able to work on a commercial project that involves Papervision3D. Papervision3D is the system that I used in this project to achieve the fantastic sense of depth and movement. The whole site is based around a stylised 'dance floor' that makes up the pages of the exciting new Eve night club website.

Papervision3D is an open-source project that makes it possible to work with real-time 3D within Flash. However I quickly discovered that 3D in Flash doesn't come cheap, and you pay in CPU. Much work had to be done to optimise graphics and settings so that the site could run on even the slowest computers... which ,in typical fashion, happen to be the clients computers!

My favourite feature of the site is the strobe lighting of the background that flicker to the streaming music. Timing graphics to music is nothing new in Flash, the trick here was to see the lights grow and flare to match the intensity of the music, without stressing an already strained CPU.
For this I used 16 streched circle graphics filled with a circle gradient (opaque centre to a transparent edge),each circle has an Overlay blend-mode and the music controls the opacity of each circle. So picture this: the intensity of the Overlay blend is varied by both the opacity in the gradient AND the opacity controlled by the music. The combination of the levels of opacity makes the lights appear to dramatically scale & radiate outwards and all-the-while its just a simple opacity change. It looks great and is very CPU friendly.

(This site has been decommissioned)