17 September 2007

Silverlight Masking Demo

MaskingDemo I've been playing around with masking and trying to think up new ways to approach the axis in which Silverlight can play. In this demo, my approach was to see how I could put in a fake 3D (2D) room with two walls playing video on them, along with reflections on the smooth glossy floor (it just got waxed, so watch your feet).

I'm not impressed with my effort to be openly honest, I wanted the VideoBrush to distort into the perspective of the walls, but sadly in XAML there isn't this capability yet. The ideal approach would of been able to apply a Path.Fill with a VideoBrush, but "that dog won't hunt".

What am I talking about? See the main wall, how it skews towards the center point, in that the wall itself gives off a different perspective then a traditional "rectangle/rotated/skewed". In Adobe Photoshop, this can be done under Distort > Perspective - and that's the functionality I was chasing in this pipedream.

Not to worry, I know people inside Microsoft (go figure) and I'll hound them for this! mark my words hehe.

I'll be doing more to this, and I'll be adding a cool "Twitter.com" concept I've been floating around. You can view this demo at Web Directions South (I'll be doing a demo on Silverlight + RIA).

Current Example: http://www.mossyblog.com/SilverlightMaskDemo/ (sorry for the download, it wasn't optimized for commercial release heh).  Protoyping is such a great way to get your head around technology.

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# Geek Life said:

Scott Barnes is a very vocal evangelist at Microsoft. He blogged about using masks and a VideoBrush in Silverlight and posted the example here. This example is a HUGE reason why I love the video support in Silverlight. Being able...

18 September 07 at 12:18 AM
# Brad said:

It is possible to create realistic vanishing-point perspective with masking and transforms.  In short, you break the perspective rectangle into a bunch of triangles and skin each of those triangles with a portion of the image or video with the appropriate transorm.  This technique has been used in flash extensively to create realtime 3d

11 October 07 at 4:59 PM

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About scbarnes

Scott Barnes currently is a Rich Platform Product Manager (WPF & Silverlight). He has been working with Adobe/Macromedia technology for the past 10 years with a main focus specifically on Internet Applications (aka. RIA, Rich Client Technology etc).

Scott first started out as a graphic designer in the late 90’s and over the years developed a passion for programmatic art (Designer + Developer mind). He recently has branched out further into 3D modelling and animation making full use of both his designer + developer mindset.

"..The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man..." - George Bernard Shaw
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