Online Home of Riley Davis

education resources

// July 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Here’s something kind of neat that I’ve been working on lately. I made some education resources over the last couple of months. Basically, they’re worksheet generators for kids in school to learn about economic concepts. They kick out a .pdf for the teacher to print off. There’s a Word Scramble, an Assessment (fill in the blank), and a Crossword Puzzle generator (all client-side!), which was definitely the most fun to make.

Adding high-res images with AlivePDF

// March 30th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

If you’ve found the awesome PDF generator AlivePDF from as3 guru Thibault Imbert and you’re struggling to figure out how to get a good looking image to show up in the generated .pdf instead of that awful screen cap, look no further.

You’ve probably found this post which sets you on the right track, but doesn’t explain several things. First and most importantly, you can’t just pass an embedded static const as a ByteArray; the alivepdf classes will return a null because you haven’t encoded the image correctly. Second, you can’t use ImageSnapshot without a lot of doing if you’re working on a pure ActionScript project since ImageSnapshot is a Flex class.

Luckily, there is a JPEGEncoder class in org.alivepdf.encoding.* in the AlivePDF library. This is just a copy of the as3 core-lib library that you probably have already. Just create an instance of the JPEGEncoder class and use the encode() method. The BitmapData object you pass is the bitmapData property of the content from your Loader or whatever. Just the content property wont work since it’s actually typed to Bitmap if you loaded an image.

Warning! encoding a jpeg with any significant size in this way comes at a significant processor cost to the user. Screen rez is obviously much less than print resolution, so use with caution.

new photo!

// November 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I was out the other day in the awesome weather, and I got some pretty good fall shots. check ‘em out.

recent motion

// November 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I’m going to have to put my show reel up here soon, but in the meantime, here is some motion work and the site that goes along with it. This video will be part of a little splash video that will play on the front of the site. The site was pretty fun to make, I got to do some tricks that I’ve been thinking about for a while. My favorite is on the splash page. There are some little particles that react to the mouse. I had to figure out some weird math to have gravity and springs working on them at the same time. (Newton’s gravity, not any cheap “falling to the bottom of the stage” stuff here) Anyways, I’ll have to repost once it’s all done. Enjoy! DJ Bobby Keys

Bobby Keys motion from Riley Davis on Vimeo.

greatest game in the universe

// November 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Plinko was the greatest game that has ever been on television, nay, ever concieved. Recently at work we were commissioned by the San Antonio Spurs to make some in-game entertainment, and they said, “What’s a good game?” And Plinko was the obvious choice. So I got to make this. Woot! Play it here. The green part isn’t messed up, even though it hurts my eyes. That’s how they key out that space to overlay video of the fan playing the game in the control booth.

wedding invitations

// July 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Here are the wedding invitations that I designed for my upcoming nuptials. One of my old college professors owns a letterpress and he hooked me up for some trade webdesign. Anyways, I’ve always wanted to make a 2-color piece, but I’m always hanging out in the digital realm… Enjoy.

Recent Photography

// July 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I’m not one really for talking about art, but here is some recent work. I’m trying to get better at mood. I think I’m just going to pick one thing and run with it for a while. I get all excited about every style out there, but life is short, and you have to be good at something. Either way, here you go

New site for the office.

// July 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I designed the new site for our company. I did all the design/code and the splash video. We’re a sports media company out of Kansas City. We make motion graphics and games for pro sports stadiums. I made a bunch of games that are being played all around the country! (the Braves, the Royals, the Pirates, and so on). Anyways, check it out for yourself! Sorry if it’s loading slow, our hosting, Lunarpages, is having some severe issues lately… dxdsports.com

just between you and me

// April 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I’ve been wanting to post this picture for quite some time now, but I was sworn to secrecy. I convinced my work that it would be cool to play Wii games on the jumbotrons at stadiums because, well, it is freaking cool. This season we just made a flash game that we played through a wii for between inning entertainment. For next season we’re working on some stuff using the bluetooth capabilities of the wiimote. It’ll be the hotness.

http://wiiflash.bytearray.org/

(We were playing this without delay on a 105 foot screen. This is not photoshopped. )

Cerner Careers

// April 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I’ve been working on this site off and on since I started working at my current studio almost a year ago. While sometimes I wanted to pull my hair out, I learned a ton about how work with a client to deliver on time, what content should be included, what to worry about and a host of other stuff. Someday when I’m all growed up I want to start my own studio, and I definitely gained a lot from this project. As a side note, I taught myself ActionScript 3 over the last few months, but this was designed in AS2. For anyone wondering if they should make the switch, the answer is YES. Do it just for the error reporting. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to write code and have it not work, with Flash being no help at all since variables are not strictly typed. AS3 is much tighter and will save you hours of your life that you could spend getting better at something else. I designed and coded almost all of this portion of the cerner careers site. Enjoy, and get a job at cerner.cernercareers.com