Creating movie clips with reflections in ActionScript 3.0

Today we posted a bunch of cool things on the Developer Center. Among the offerings is a very interesting article by Ben Pritchard called Creating movie clips with reflections in ActionScript 3.0. You’ve probably seen the use of reflections in some of the latest Web 2.0 websites. Something like an album cover or video player reflects some sort of virtual floor beneath it. This tutorial steps you through the creation of the Reflect class, a custom ActionScript 3.0 class that Ben wrote so you can apply reflections to movie clips your Flash CS3 Professional projects.

Example of the Reflect class in action:

Check out Figure 1, which you can interact with. Move the sliders and see the effect on the static image or video playing. Figure 3 is an animation that shows how you have to fine-tune the reflection technique.

Ben runs a blog called Pixelfumes and helps run the Pittsburgh Flash Users Group (PittMFUG). It’s cool how the Flash developer community helped him finesse his AS3 class. He writes, “After my original code for reflecting movie clips in ActionScript 2.0 was released on my blog, many gracious members of the Flash community posted helpful comments, feature requests, and even code snippets to help improve the class. The updated class described in this article takes into consideration these additions from users who dedicated their time and effort to help me improve it.”

Enjoy!