What is a Logarithmic spiral? A logarithmic spiral steps around center at an additive rate while stepping away from center at a multiplicative rate. Increasing the distance from center at a multiplicative rate causes the arm of a logarithmic spiral to increase in size as it gets further from center. To illustrate, take a look at this photo of a spiral staircase:
Photo by: darijus
As you can see in the above photo, the number of steps …
Read More
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: …
Read More
In my previous article explaining How to Draw an Arc with ActionScript a few readers asked how to simulate the swing of a pendulum or the swaying motion of a falling leaf. Hopefully this tutorial will add a little insight into that process. The technique I’ll be using won’t mimic the effects of gravity but will be more similar to the metered swing of a clock’s pendulum or a large carnival ride.
Observations: Before we start writing any code, let’s make a few general observations. If you were to swing a pendulum from right to left, you could note the following:
Conventions: With those observations in mind we can start …
Read More
Drawing an arc (a segment of a circle’s circumference) is very similar to drawing a complete circle. Just like drawing a circle, drawing an arc requires you to specify the center, the radius, and the number of steps to take from the first point to the last. But drawing an arc also requires additional information such as the angle of the first point on the arc, the direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise) to travel around the circle’s circumference, and the angle of the last point on the arc. …
Read More
Do you know how to draw a circle with ActionScript code? It’s a handy thing to know. You can use it to draw pie charts, equilateral polygons, analog clock faces… you can even use it to script motion. If you use Flash for any type of drawing purposes, knowing the math behind the circles (trigonometry) can be very helpful. In the simplest of terms, drawing a circle can be as easy as counting from 0 to 1. …
Read More
Comments(2)
RSS Feeds