Aviary Blog

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This is just a quick follow up post to share more of the artwork for Aviary’s upcoming advertising campaign, in this case for Hummingbird, our upcoming Flash-Player based 3D modeller. We are basing this particular piece on M.C. Escher‘s famous work, Relativity.

This will be available for sale in our market as a poster, with ad copy and without.

And as usual, Meowza knocks it out of the park.

Next up: A large analysis of the features in Phoenix, Aviary’s Flash-based image editor.]]>

For example:

http://creationonthefly.com/blog/24 became http://a.viary.com/blog/posts/get_bezier

Some RSS feed aggregators like MXNA seem to have interpreted the changes as if we had made entirely new posts and reindexed us. I also saw that happen to our Feedburner RSS feed subscribers.

We apologize for any annoyance this may have caused.]]>

I wanted to showcase some of our talented Artist in Residence’s work for our upcoming marketing campaign. This is the artwork and some rough text layout for the part of the campaign for Raven, our vector editor.

This particular ad is inspired by and parodies Marcos Chin’s stunning work for Lava Life.

Our artist is Brent Koby, otherwise known affectionately to Worth1000 users as Meowza.

We are creating an ad for almost every tool on our list.

All Brent’s artwork created for the campaign will be purchasable on mounted posters through our market once we launch (with or without ad text). We created everything to be stand-alone beautiful on their own.

Another example of an ad was already displayed on our blog (the artwork will also be used in our upcoming book).



PS. I’ve been told by some people they want this blog to focus on the tool development alone, but I have to disagree. Our marketing is just as important as the tools they help promote. It doesn’t matter how great our tools work – without an attractive message drawing people in, nobody will ever want to try them in the first place. If you agree and would like to see more artwork for our upcoming campaigns, let me know in the comments below.

Update! Even our error messages were done by Brent. For instance, here is a nice easter egg for those of you who encounter any errors on our site.]]>

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Click here to play with the interactive 3D model.

Here you can see a real reflective material effect placed on our Hummingbird logo.

You can see just how much improved this new gold material effect is over the last time we updated on this topic:



Material effects like these are only possible because Hummingbird, our Flash-based 3D modeller, utilizes the powerful open source Away3D flash engine.

Why did we choose Away3D to power Hummingbird when there were other very competent 3D engines like Papervision3D and Sandy available?

Simple: Technical realism is a must. Hummingbird will be used to render realistic 3d photo objects for use in other Aviary tools (like Phoenix). Away3D supports features like corrective z-sorting, ensuring us that pictures will be rendered correctly, with polygons appearing exactly as they should. Add incredible real-time material effects previously unseen in Flash and it was perfect for our needs.

Update! More interactive demos:

– Reflective directional lighting
– smooth shading
– transparent reflections]]>

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Woodpecker is the newest addition to our growing list of web-based design tools and also serves as an interesting experiment for us, in that it is the first application to be built using the Aviary Framework. Although it is being built specifically to be included as a part of the Aviary suite, we are also using it as a prototype for the platform model we ultimately hope to enable: Namely to let developers profit from the tools and additional functionality they build into our framework.

Woodpecker is based on a concept called Seam Carving, pioneered by the brilliant Dr. Ariel Shamir, now employed by Adobe. Seam Carving is a method through which an image is cropped without harming the important content of an image.

Without any advanced editing on the part of the user, Woodpecker can take you from this:



to this:



We considered this a really neat addition to our growing suite of web applications, and a quick one to develop as well. Our development team was able to build Woodpecker onto our framework in approximately 20 man-hours. Here’s a quick tour of Woodpecker in action. Of the few Flash demos of Seam Carving that have gone up, Woodpecker is the most complete to date.

Woodpecker allows for precision control during mask painting (for protection and removal of specific items in an image). This means that you can protect (or auto-remove) specific parts of your image just by painting them green or red!



Woodpecker allows for multiple methods of seam carving (including novice and expert modes), which is very useful because not all images will display good results when carved using the same methods.



It allows for pixel addition as well, which means in addition to being able to remove pixels from an image, Woodpecker can also enlarge an image without warping the important content! Imagine the possibilities when trying to fill a specific sized frame, to not have to rely on the clone stamp tool in Photoshop (or Phoenix) to get a natural looking background.

Woodpecker will also be available on AIR as a stand alone desktop tool. We’re giving out beta access to it (just sign up for image editing beta invites).

If you’re currently at Adobe Max in Chicago and would like to see Woodpecker (or any tool in the suite), drop us an email at aviary( a )worth1000.com.

To learn more about seam carving in general, here’s a (pretty viral) video of seam carving using Dr. Shamir’s desktop tool.

<a href='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc' class='author' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'><b>flash video</b></a>

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In other news: team member Michael had the pleasure of demonstrating Phoenix on AIR at Adobe’s On AIR tour stop in NY on Monday. We had a blast – Adobe really puts on a great show.

We can also add to the press that Aviary received with this video interview posted on InfoWorld. Watch]]>

TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco (and a quick stop in Seattle) where we got to demonstrate our suite of tools and marketplace to the public for the first time.

The reaction was fantastic! Industry people with any kind of background in the arts really loved what we are trying to accomplish with Aviary and requested beta invites.

We even got some press interested too. Here’s some coverage from the first day of the conference.

The San Francisco Chronicle said:

Ars Technica said (while discussing their favorite picks of the conference):

ABC 30 in San Francisco said (while discussing their favorite picks of the conference):

Other trip highlights:

- We saw MC Hammer walk by our booth, dress like a normal human being. He’s funded a dance social network.

- I checked out ImageKind‘s cool Seattle digs.

- I spent a few hours with Ryan Stewart from Adobe and let him play with Aviary. It was like watching a kid in a candy store. (You’ll all know the feeling soon).

We’ll be joining Adobe’s On AIR Tour tomorrow for their New York City stop and plan on showing a demo of Phoenix on AIR at around 6:00 PM. The audience is already sold out, but if you’re planning on attending please do drop us a line and let us know at aviary(a)worth1000.com.

[Sidenote: We really lucked out with our bird metaphor working so well with the AIR brand].]]>