Kevin Goldsmith

I’ve posted a version of the tutorial on using Pixel Bender to animate a particle system that I did at Adobe MAX last year on the Pixel Bender section of the Adobe Developer Network. Take a look and let me know if there are more things around this that you would be interested in.

thanks!

UPDATE 12.17.2010! We’ve resolved the bug and posted a new build. Please download this new build and use at will!

UPDATE 12.13.2010! It looks like the problem we discovered is Mac-only. We now have a repro case and are working on a new build. Please reply to this post if you’ve seen any issues with parameters not appearing on Windows machines (we can’t repro that case). If you are running on a mac, please skip this build and we’ll post another ASAP.

UPDATE 12.11.2010! It looks like something went wrong in the staging and the wrong version was posted. Please hold off installing for now.

The newest version of the Pixel Bender Toolkit, 2.5 is now available for download from the Pixel Bender Technology Center or as an update if you installed it as part of the Creative Suite or After Effects or Flash Pro.

This new version includes some bug fixes and a new graphical editor for creating Pixel Bender graphs for Photoshop or After Effects.

One thing to be careful on, if you currently have version 2.1 of the Pixel Bender Toolkit installed, you need to follow some instructions in the release notes before installing version 2.5

Happy Pixel Bending!

I was going to wait and see if we were going to publish an “official” video, but, eh, why wait?

For those who were not there. I need to explain something about some of my outbursts. The main rule of the sneak is that you are limited to 5 minutes. This year, we had a klingon timekeeper (played excellently by Flash Catalyst Product Manager, Doug Winnie). He was supposed to come out close to 5 minutes to “remove” you if you ran over time. Doug and I being pals, he decided to start creeping across the stage towards me much earlier. Nothing is more distracting that a klingon creeping up on you out of the corner of your eye

I really had a great time doing this. I had a lot of stuff to cover, but I managed to get most of it in with one main exception:
PIXEL BENDER 3D RUNS ON THE GPU IN FLASH EVEN ON MOBILE DEVICES.

Special thanks to YouTube user wooyaggo for uploading this!

Tonight in the sneak peaks at MAX, I announced a project my team has been working on: Pixel Bender 3D for the new Flash player Molehill APIs.

This new version of Pixel Bender includes an Actionscript API which will let you combine Pixel Bender Material and Vertex kernels at runtime and includes a lot of optimization tricks plus helper APIs that simplify using the Molehill shader APIs.

I’ll be posting more info about this new language, APIs and tools soon.

Yes, first I am going to flog my MAX Bring-your-own-laptop lab again…

Intermediate Pixel Bender: Pixels and Beyond
Attend this lab for an introduction to topics like optimizing your Adobe Pixel Bender and ActionScript code; using ShaderJobs to process data asynchronously; using Pixel Bender to process audio and other non-image data efficiently in your Flash movies; taking advantage of Pixel Bender parameter metadata; and new Pixel Bender APIs in Flex 4. We’ll also give you a look under the hood regarding how the Pixel Bender runtime works in Adobe Flash Player 10.

Wednesday, October, 27th, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Room: 510

Now on to the links!

Droste Pixel Bender Plug-in tutorial

Helen Bradley has posted a tutorial on using Tom Beddard’s Droste Effect in Photoshop on the Digital Photography School blog.

Francois Tarlier is back with another in his series of useful Pixel Bender filters for After Effects, this time he has a tool to help you identify pixels in your footage that are too light or dark, ft-Brightness Check. He also has some other very useful Pixel Bender filters for After Effects for sale on aescripts.

AndrewYY's UVmapper Pixel Bender plug-in for After Effects

AndrewYY has also posted a nice set of Pixel Bender utility plug-ins for After Effects on the loops.net forums

Satya Meka has posted a new Pixel Bender filter for AE called “Dot Pixels” also on aescripts, which looks really fun.

In the some-of-the-older-stuff-I-missed-previously department…

Made By Pi Blend Modes

Mike A from Made by Pi posted an update to his Blend Modes library for Flash.

I just came across this great Page Turn Pixel Bender filter for Flash (with Source!) from Thomas Vian.

Thanks again, and REGISTER FOR MY LAB!

With all my travel and prepping for travel, I’ve let my new tradition fall by the wayside a bit. Catching up…

This morning (West coast time), Ralph Hauwert posted a clip of a cool plasma generator written in Pixel Bender and rendered in After Effects:

Green Plasma 3D from Ralph Hauwert on Vimeo.

Also, I finally got a chance to watch the video of Ralph’s talk at FFK which was filmed in April in Cologne (another excellent conference). A great talk with some nice Pixel Bender goodness:

FFK10: Ralph Hauwert – SKUNKWORKS from marc thiele on Vimeo.

Simo Santavirta posted some images from his Pixel Bender Ray Tracing experiments.

Rayslime from Simo Santavirta

He also posted some trickiness with #defines to help do fixed-length loops when targeting your Pixel Bender kernels for Flash. Believe me, loops are on the agenda for Flash. We feel your pain. (Literally!)

Francois Tarlier posted some new useful Pixel Bender-based filters for After Effects. This one, his filmic look plug-in, is really nice.

You can find that plug-in here.

Takayuki Fukatsu created a nice painting app using Pixel Bender, Flashpaint.

flashpaint

Flashpaint from Takayuki Fukatsu

Henrique Vilela posted two new real-time Flash-based filters.

Real-time Cartoonizer by Henrique Vilela

The Real-time Cartoonizer and the Fire Webcam Effect (with source)

Andre Cavallari posted a new tutorial on creating Pixel Bender filters.

Create Custom Filters Using the Pixel Bender Toolkit by Andre Cavallari

Lots more to catch up on, but this is all for now. Thanks!

This hasn’t been added to the schedule yet, it should be soon, but I wanted to give a heads up on this. I’m teaching a course on Pixel Bender this year, picking up from where my labs in 2008 left off. Here is the current description:
So you’ve walked through the tutorials, added some filters to your display objects, maybe added a animating parameter or two, even written some of your own filters from scratch. What next? This lab will introduce you to topics like: optimizing your Pixel Bender and Actionscript code; using ShaderJobs to process data asynchronously; using Pixel Bender to process audio and other non-image data efficiently in your Flash movies; taking advantage of Pixel Bender parameter metadata; new Pixel Bender APIs in Flex4; and will give you a look under the covers to how Pixel Bender runtime works in Flash Player 10.1

I’d like your input on topics that you’d like me to cover. Please leave your suggestions in the comments.

Also, in my previous labs, I used Flash Pro, this time I’d like to use Flash Builder, but I can go either way. Which would you prefer?

For those figuring out their MAX schedule, it looks like my lab will be on Monday at 5pm in room 402AB.

Update: The 90 minute session will be Wednesday, October 27 at 04:00PM in room 402AB. It is right at the end of MAX, so hopefully you will be able to attend.

If you are interested in attending my lab, please make sure that you at least are comfortable with the things I covered in my introductory tutorial.

Hope to see you there!

Hello again! I’ve been out of the office most of the week, so this will be a linkeriffic post:

David Lanearts 4D julia set

David Lenaerts has been putting together some mind-blowing math-intensive Pixel Bender filters for a while now. This week he posted some more info (and source!) on how he achieved metaballs and 4D Julia sets using Pixel Bender: Marching Cubes using Pixel Bender: Metaballs / LoFi 4D Julia Set

SSAO using Pixel Bender

Ben Hopkins (kode80) has posted the source code from his SSAO experiments with Pixel Bender to google code.

Photoshop User TV Episode 238

Photoshop User TV covers the Pixel Bender Plug-in for Photoshop (‘natch) in this week’s episode.

Thanks again to the community for your contributions!

There was a lot of work on Pixel Bender, under the hood, for CS5. One of the main things that you’ll see in your CS5 apps is significant performance improvements when running Pixel Bender on the CPU. We partnered with Intel to drastically improve our X86 and X64 Pixel Bender performance on Windows and Mac. We also did significant amounts of work ourselves to improve our threading and Pixel Bender jitting. This means much faster Pixel Bender renders in After Effects, Photoshop and the Pixel Bender Toolkit in CPU-mode.

For Flash developers, the Pixel Bender Toolkit now includes a live Flash preview so that you can see EXACTLY what your image processing filters or blends will look like in the player. We’ve also added many of the top feature requests from the community.

There were a ton of other tweaks we did that you won’t notice (except in increased performance or stability) in many of Adobe’s other applications. It is just one more way that we think that CS5 is the most outstanding collection of Adobe apps ever!

I can’t keep up with the community! As with the previous posts, there is no particular rhyme or reason, these are just things open up in tabs in my browser right now…

Slender Pixel Bender by Taras Novak
A great take on a Pixel Bender filter explorer showing you all the metadata and a preview image.

SmartAA – reconstruct anti aliasing with
Pixel Bender by Jan-C. Frischmuth (the same person who did Real-time Screen Space Ambient Occlusion with Pixel Bender and After Effects) A lot of cool Pixel Bender experiments happening on this blog, definitely worth checking out.

I love seeing experiments using Pixel Bender to do simulation in the player.

Using Pixel Bender for Math in Flash/FLEX by Rob Skelly
Nice article on off-loading math computation to Pixel Bender.

Pixel Bender Disco by Jozef Chúťka
Really trippy real-time visuals created with multiple Pixel Bender filters.

PixelBender Raytracer & Milkyball by Ralph Hauwert
Ralph is at it again, doing some really amazing things combining his knowledge of 3D with the capabilities of Pixel Bender. When I showed this to the Flash team, they were blown away.