Blood flow in a circular maze?

Question

How can I create an animation in flash as3 in which I can show a blood stream ppassing through a circular maze? for example, here's a maze: http://lonestar.texas.net/~dianes/labyrinth/maze.jpg I want to make blood flow through that maze like in veins... Or better that that if I could make a circular venular image and make blood flow through it in smooth motion.

I'm trying to make an analog clock, in which I want to keep this venular circle as the background. I don't have much knowledge in as3, but I'll try to understand if there's a code for this...

Also if it can also be possible to get the blood around the border of some text (logo)

Thanks.

Answer 1

Animation

The simplest way would be to do the animation, without any code, with Flash. I assume you have only one animation to do, the maze and/or logo won't change.

The idea is to use your maze as a mask and have the blood in a layer below. Then you may draw the flow of blood with the brush frame by frame quite roughly (it will be masked anyway).

Code

Using some code will be more complex. The only advantage is that it's dyanmic and will adapt to any shape, I don't know if it is what you want.

1. I would first choose the first point, the origin of the blood stream and paint it red.
2. Then I would use a convolution matrix to do a dilation of this pixel.
3. Then I would remove the pixels that do not belong to the masking shape (the maze)
4. I would compare this image to the image given by the previous iteration, if it is not the same, I would loop to 2.