Spinning Ball Effect

I had a lovely little distraction from normal work a couple of weeks ago: our designer Colin was creating some banner ads for Eircom’s Goal Machine game, and wanted a ‘spinning football’ effect to go into an animation.

It’s a small thing, and not my day-to-day job by any means, but a bit of programmatic animation was a welcome change from the long haul of UI, MMO and avatars.

The football was created using a DisplacementMap. It’s unusual to find a DisplacementMap example that isn’t a map of the Earth, but it works in the same way as all of those others, with the container being rotated as it goes.

A tutorial will follow, but the Displacement Map is about the most complicated bit of Flash to follow, particularly if you’re not a mathematician, so it will take some time to explain clearly! Watch this space.