henry's blog

In early 2008, Cadbury’s were launching a new TV advert and wanted a new online presence for their “Glass and a Half Full Productions” brand. This site would provide information about Cadbury’s and the adverts, and also house some fun interactive bits & bobs inspired by these adverts.

We pitched for and won two interactive activities. The first of these activities, and the one which I’ll talk about in this post was named ‘Tricked Out Trucks’. The brief was simple enough: we were to create a tool which would allow visitors to the site to customise an airport truck in 3D. The creator of the best design (as picked by a panel of luminaries) would win that truck for real, all pimped out and delivered to their door. Apparently, the client had come to this concept without ever having seen Den Ivanov & PARK Studio’s Brahma Bus in 2007, and were very surprised when we told them about it :)

We ended up differing from PARK Studio’s (pretty seminal) app in two ways. First, rather than allow freehand drawing, we assumed that most casual visitors to the site either wouldn’t have the artistic skills or inclination to draw an elaborate design, so we provided preset patterns which the user could customise to their liking and decals which they could transform and place freely. Second, we wanted to allow users to make modifications to the shape of the truck by adding body mods: spoilers, wheels and wing mirrors.

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Last summer, Mathmos asked us if we fancied doing something for the 45th birthday of their iconic Astro Lamp. We felt that a natural fit for this would be a screen saver that simulated the lava lamp.

From a coder’s perspective, this project had two interesting problems to solve. Firstly, we had to consider the physics at work inside a lava lamp in order to create a realistic simulation. Secondly, once you’ve figured out where your blobs are, their sizes and how they’re moving, you need to draw them in a satisfyingly blobby way.

This second post will cover how I went about drawing those blobs. You can read Part I here.
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Last summer, Mathmos asked us if we fancied doing something for the 45th birthday of their iconic Astro Lamp. We felt that a natural fit for this would be a screen saver that simulated the lava lamp.

From a coder’s perspective, this project had two interesting problems to solve. Firstly, we had to consider the physics at work inside a lava lamp in order to create a realistic simulation. Secondly, once you’ve figured out where your blobs are, their sizes and how they’re moving, you need to draw them in a satisfyingly blobby way.

In this first post, I’m going to talk about the physical model we created to simulate the motion of blobs in a lava lamp. You can read Part II here.
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