As promised, the Pixel Bender 3D Beta for Molehill is now live on Adobe labs! there is still a lot of work to do, but we decided to get you the tools as early as we could so that you could start to play with them. There is also a new Pixel Bender 3D subforum in the Pixel Bender devnet forums for your questions, requests and bug reports.
Enjoy!
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!
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 release fixes a number of bugs from the first CS5 preview release and also adjust the image size limits when GPU processing to let you work with larger images on graphics cards with more memory. See the release notes for more information.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/pixelbenderplugin/
A great collaboration between the Photoshop and Adobe Image Foundation teams.
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!
