PiXELWiT

Making the transition from drawing circles to drawing ovals is pretty simple but when you need to go from drawing ovals to drawing rotated ovals, you might run into a few problems. This article documents some of the pitfalls I encountered and presents them as a learning experience. If you just want some solid code to draw rotated ovals or twisted ellipses, skip ahead to the end of the article and copy the last block of code. If you think you might gain from my experience then by all means… read on. …
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A while ago I wrote a Hexadecimal Color Fading Tutorial explaining how to select a single color at any point on a gradient between two specified colors. In that tutorial there was a function which efficiently broke each of the 2 specified colors into their Red, Green and Blue components and then calculated a single new color at a specified point between them.

Here's what the code looks like: ...
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This tutorial covers the basic concepts needed to draw a simple spiral with ActionScript. A “simple spiral” or an “Archimedean spiral” is created by moving ‘away from’ and ‘around‘ a central point at a constant additive rate. If that sounds a bit foreign to you, don’t worry it’s nothing new. If you’ve coiled a hose or rope on a flat surface, you have experience working with Archimedean spirals.

(Photo by Paul Needham)

The most notable characteristic of the simple spiral above is that each coil (a full rotation around center) will always increase the spiral’s radius by the same amount (the width of the rope).

Now that you understand what a simple spiral is, I’d like to jump ahead a bit and show you the final state of our code: …
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If you’ve ever wondered how Adobe Flash draws a curve when issued a “curveTo” command this article will help you visualize the process.

As you probably know, Flash requires three points to draw an exponential curve.

1. A Starting Point. Wherever the Flash drawing pen is currently located. If you have not previously moved the pen with “lineTo”, “curveTo”, or “moveTo” the pen defaults to the origin (0, 0).
2. A Control Point. A point which the the Flash drawing pen will head toward before changing direction and heading toward the end point. The pen generally does not go through the control point unless your “curve” is nearly straight.
3. An End Point. Where the Flash drawing pen will come to rest when the curve is complete.

But how exactly does the control point “control” the shape of the curve? How does Flash precisely map the vague concept of heading towards a point and then land precisely at another point? Take a look at the SWF file below …
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