SlideShowPro News: Entry Archive

03.28.07 | "Wet Floor" with SlideShowPro

Last night a SlideShowPro user emailed me, saying he was having syncing problems with two instances of the component in the same movie. Thinking he had mistakenly added the second instance (for you should only need one) I told him to delete it. He replied that he couldn't delete the second one because it was used as a "reflection." Not sure was he was implying, I checked out his movie.

The second instance of SlideShowPro was below the first, flipped vertically, and with a pseudo gradient mask layered above it. In other words, he was (rather inventively) recreating the popular "wet floor" look you see all around the web these days. Despite its popularity, I had never thought of using SlideShowPro in this manner, nor had I seen anyone else attempt it. And it looked fantastic.

But how could the affect be achieved without two component instances? I thought about it for a few minutes, then remembered the BitmapData object in Flash 8. What if we only used one instance of SlideShowPro, and used ActionScript to create the effect?

After about an hour of tinkering, I got it working.

At first glance it looks like a Photoshop effect, but notice what happens when the images change or you rollover the thumbnails in the navigation. Ahhh yeah, a live reflection. This is accomplished by using an enterFrame event to render the bitmap with every frame tick.

If you're a SlideShowPro user and would like to see how it's done, login to your member account and click on the "SlideShowPro" text link under "Your product purchases". Scroll down on the next page and look for "Wet Floor." There's a link to the FLA there.

Have fun!