Kevin Goldsmith

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!

Here are some of the interesting Pixel Bender links I heard about this week.

Jono Kafkaris background subtraction

Jono Kafkaris posted a background subtraction Pixel Bender filter (with actionscript source) on his blog.

Nathanael de Jager is working some face detection algorithms and is using Pixel Bender (I hope for more than the pixelation in this video!)

=>
Ralph Hauwert is using Pixel Bender to mimic photo effects.

From the Archive, I also wanted to post some links:

Andy Li's treshold and chroma-key filter

Pixel Bender Intro from Satya Meka on Vimeo.

In May, Satya Meka posted a tutorial video on Pixel Bender for non-programmers to his blog.

That’s all the links for this week, but watch this blog for more info on some upcoming talks, a Pixel Bender Meetup in San Francisco in a couple weeks and a job opening in my group!

Two new Tutorials crossed my browser this week for the Pixel Bender plug-in for CS5. Both about the Oil Paint filter. Now folks, the Oil Paint filter is pretty awesome, but you know that you can run lots of other filters in the Pixel Bender plug-in too, right?

El tutorial primero es en español por mis amigos que hablan español: [CORRECTION: it is Portuguese, not Spanish, D'oh!]

(via http://canalphotoshop.info/2010/08/download-adobe-pixel-bender.html)

The second tutorial is in the Queen’s english, courtesy of Gavin Hoey:

Oil Painting Effect in Photoshop CS5 & Pixel Bender from Gavin Hoey on Vimeo.

Sambaverse by Ben Gomez Farrell

One post that got people excited this week was the announcement of the Sambaverse alpha from Ben Gomez Farrell. This is Ben’s description of what he is trying to accomplish: “I needed a tool that was smart enough to load an MP3, take a good stab at automatically detecting beats, break, loud sections, and different sections of the song – like verses and choruses.” And Pixel Bender? “I used Pixel Bender to get a huge speed increase when loading the sound initially. That was a lot of fun once I figured out how to get it working.”

Color keying with Flash Builder 4 by Luis Estevez

Luis Estevez created a sample of using Pixel Bender to do color keying in the player. Here is his post in Spanish and English.

Flex 4 Fun by Chet Haase

Chet Haase has written a book called “Flex 4 Fun” that includes at least a chapter on Pixel Bender.

"Pixel Bender: A Gradient… and Some Math" from David Van Brink

Here is an older link, but one I just came across this week, from David Van Brink’s Omino Pixel Blog: “Pixel Bender: A Gradient… and Some Math.” I really like how he digs into the math to explain how it works. A great blog, and a nice filter too!

It is pretty amazing that every week I have new links to post from Pixel Bender developers. I’m going to try and work in some of the old links that I’ve got too as I go too. More links next week!

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!

some new Pixel Bender – related links that have popped up on my radar this week:

Pixel Bender Kernel Viewer by Alexander Zats

Axelander Zats has created a nice web-based viewer for PBJ files.

Spotlight Filter by Ryan Phelan

This is the Spotlight filter from Ryan Phelan. This one isn’t new, I’ve been meaning to post to it for a while. The filter itself is nice, but I also like the UI that Ryan created for editing the spotlight parameters.

Don’t forget to tweet me your links: @pixelbender!

Here are a bunch more Pixel Bender links from the community… For a more steady stream of links, follow my Pixel Bender Tumblog or the @PixelBender account on twitter. I’m going to try to get in the habit of posting some links every Friday as I can.

A question that comes up occasionally is “How do I do the water ripple effect in Pixel Bender?” I was going to do up a sample, but then I came across this post on sewonist.com that is a follow on from this post by Hannes Moser.

ripple effect in action

David Van Brink has posted another Pixel Bender filter oriented towards After Effects users on his Omino Pixel Blog: Omino Stamp a Pixel Bender Filter. This is really useful for creating some nice patterned fills.

Pattern example from Omino Stamp

There has been a lot of excitement around this post from Jozef Chutka: Anaglyphs With Pixel Bender & Depth Map, because it is really cool. A great 3D depth-map effect done with Pixel Bender.

3D image from Jozef Chutka

For Flash developers (and others!) Christoffer Enedahls has created a great tool for your animation toolbox: the SquishFilter, which gives you some nice deformation effects for your Flash animations.

Christoffer Enedahls' Squish Filter

Devon O. Wolfgang has written a cool Bayer Mosaic Filter In Pixel Bender, which could be the start of something very cool.

Devon O. Wolfgang Bayer Mosaic Filter

Mansour Raad wrote a Pixel Bender filter to help him project NOAA data onto a map: Pixel Bender For Map Projection.

Pixel Bender For Map Projection by Mansour Raad

Patrick Gunderson has been exploring using Pixel Bender to generate visual noise.

Patrick Gunderson's GNoiseExplorer

Jean-Marc Le Roux has been working on a 3D library, Minko, and is now using Pixel Bender to provide Pixel Shaders for it.

Jean-Marc Le Roux's Minko Lamborghini

Thanks to everyone in the community for sharing your work and especially your source! It is one of the things that makes the Flash Community so vibrant!