Metaballs, actionscript 3.0

My simple and fast versio of metaballs, based more on graphics and image manipulation than 3D-maths:

We use precounted bitmap-images such as this:

Here are the channels separated,
in RGB channels we have a rendered image of a sphere,
Alpha channel is generated by the distance to image’s center

We draw some of these using bitmapData.draw:

That looks very sci-fi already,
but the final touch is to still make some more adjusting on the alpha-channel,
now looking like a X-ray shot:

We add contrast (16x)  to alpha and come up with this:

… and … that’s all, there we have it, the metaball -image - click for demo* :

Actionscript-code

… and this is just the principle. It would be easy to add shadows, Z-dimension, more advanced interactivity, maybe visual effects such as glows, some kinna reflections, displacementMapFilter etc. to it…

(* fix: try Firefox, if demo looks like a thumbnail/peephole in MS-Explorer, I’ll fix that later …