Thursday Link Dump, What a Day!

Boy, oh boy, do I have updates for you!

• firstborn. My friends relaunch their flagship site. Congratulations! It’s totally PIMP! Be sure to check out Zune Journey which they just launched as well, it’s a really, really fun site. I love seeing sites like this that are just fun, cute, happy, and aren’t heavy-handed with the marketing.
• EOS 400d site, using papervision with a photos-in-space collage to really great effect! Feels a lot like the interface in Photosynth. The hinting the camera uses to change angle toward points of interest, and smoothly traverse around objects in the foreground, make this interface really smooth and very filmic!
• Away3D normal mapping demo. This really blew me away. Normal mapping is, I feel, somewhat of a holy grail for software 3d packages like Away3D and Papervision, because it lets you display very simplified geometry, but shade it like the high-resolution original model. You can see the bust is only rendering maybe a hundred or two hundred polys, but the impression it gives is of a very nicely detailed model, because lighting calculations use normals from a prerendered normal map rather than from geometry. BRAVO!
• FOAM. My brilliant accomplice Drew Cummins’s new physics engine, which he created because there aren’t enough physics engines in Flash. Just kidding, he made it to play with maths and so we can make games with it! And so I can use the term Range-Kutta when talking about it, which I love.
• PARKLAB. This one isn’t new at all, but I just wanted to point it out. These guys are great designers and great programmers, and it could be my favorite flash experiment blog out there. I’m a fan.