I am not naive enough to believe I originally created this effect. As with anything, there always seems to be someone somewhere that did it sometime before :). Either way, I made a version of it for my previous site in AS2 and it came with me when I updated the site.

Ever since that first site there’s been a somewhat steady flow of questions regarding it. I vaguely remember writing a AS2 tutorial for it on gotoandlearn and I get a lot of mails regarding it.

So, I figured I’d take advantage of AS3’s massive improvements and create a transition class with the same effect. It’s hard to give it a specific name, but I’ve always called it the “pixelating transition“. You’ll understand when you check it out. Go ahead tough guy. Click the header!

Well.. everyone loves transitions right? I do anyway. Even if they are utterly useless like the firefly one I posted a few days ago I still enjoy it just for the sake of the ‘ooooo‘ effect it can produce. I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for the pure visual parts of flash, which is probably why I went in the direction of ActionScript instead of C# or something else.

This class will take any content you give to it (A displayobject is required though) and distort it with the help of Perlin Noise, DisplacementMapFilter and a Blurfilter. The end result is something that looks like its ‘rippling out‘. (lack of better words! haha)

It dispatches an event when the content is completely gone, and you can choose what to do before starting the ‘road back’ so to speak. The last event it dispatches triggers a reset of the parameters so you can do it all over again! Click the ducky to try it! Download the class inside…