Screendump from within Actionscript 3.0 is it possible or?

Question

We have Bitmap and Bitmapdata objects now. And when using the webcam, we can get raw-pixeldata output from it. But, can we get raw-pixeldata from the "stage" or "swf" object somehow?

I would like to use this to make "small thumbnails" of certain parts of Actionscript applications and these could be complex compositions of dynamic text, bitmap graphics and movieclips at the same time. So it would be nice to make a "quick snap" and just get the current combined pixels into one bitmap and then be able to "save that for later use".

Is that possible? is it too easy? am I just looking the wrong place in the Adobe Docs?

We have images, vectors etc at the same time on stage, so I need to grab the "stage" objects bitmapdata???

Answer 1

Create a BitmapData and call its draw() method with the corresponding DisplayObject

var bmpData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(sprite.width, sprite.height, true);
bmpData.draw(sprite);

If you want to make thumbnails smaller, create a Matrix and call its createBox method with required scaling parameters and pass it to the draw method.

var bmpData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(thumbW, thumbH, true);
var mat:Matrix = new Matrix();
mat.createBox(thumbW / sprite.width, thumbH / sprite.height);
bmpData.draw(sprite, mat);