Kevin Goldsmith

Pixel Bender has been living on Adobe labs since it was first introduced at MAX 2007. Since CS4 and Flash Player 10 though it has joined the ranks of "real" Adobe technologies.

We've finally created "official" areas for Pixel Bender in the Adobe Developer Connection and Adobe Cookbook sites. We've also moved the Pixel Bender forum out of the labs forums area and into the main Adobe forums site. These join the Pixel Bender exchange as great resources for Pixel Bender developers.

The Pixel Bender Technology Center

This is now the main page for the Pixel Bender technology. Currently it features information on learning Pixel Bender and links to tutorial videos, references, the latest official downloads and more.


The Pixel Bender Cookbook


Looking for a place to post useful Actionscript or Pixel Bender code, or find code from other folks? This is the new place. You can also request recipes from the community.

The Pixel Bender Forum

Pixel Bender's heritage is from the 3D Pixel Shading languages, but we carefully removed most of that to make it specialized for signal processing. The lineage is there though, right below the surface, and Pixel Bender's utility for doing a lot of math fast makes it really attractive for doing 3D. I've written about 3D experiments from the community in the posts Some cool experiments with Pixel Bender and More Cool Pixel Bender Experiments. There has been a lot of really cool work done in the community since then, and I wanted to highlight that:

David Lenaerts has been busy combining Away3D and Pixel Bender, especially for Normal maps: Away3D 3.4.2: Pixel Bender to the max!

Kris Temmerman has also been experimenting with Pixel Bender and Normal Maps.

This is a demo video of a different ray tracer written in Pixel Bender by macduyhai.

Here is an article on integrating Pixel Bender and Papervision3D

Tom Beddard has been doing really cool fractal tools with Pixel Bender. His new Mandelbulbs are really beautiful.

Jerzy Drozda Jr did some experiments with Pixel Bender for UV Mapping in After Effects.

Stay tuned for more links!

I have over 100 links stored in my bookmarks of pages that Pixel Bender developers have created that I want to feature here, but I've been working so hard on the next version of our stuff that I've obviously gotten very far behind. With the end of the year approaching, I'm going to try and rectify that somewhat... starting today.

The links today are in no particular order, they are literally the tabs I have open in Firefox right now:

Elad Elrom - Using Pixel Bender to do heavy lifting calculations, makes Flash Player multi-thread

Eugene Zatepyakin - Canny Edge Detector [AS3 + PixelBender]

Daniel Rinehart - Image Rotation with Pixel Bender

David Lenaerts (Der Schmale) - Render Bender v0.1: optimizing my Flash+Pixel Bender workflow

Nicolas Barradeau - PIXEL BENDER #1 color tweaking

Brooks Andrus - Bilinear Resampling, ShaderJob, Pixel Bender And Flash Player

That is it for this post, but expect more soon!

He is the panel on Flash Games from MAX 2009 in Los Angeles:

and here is the panel titled "Preparing the world for ubiquitous Parallelism" at the SC09 conference in Portland
Youtube link

I'm going to be in Portland, Oregon this Friday. At 10:30 I'll be on a panel at the Supercomputing 2009 conference with folks from Intel, NVidia, AMD, Dreamworks and Contra Costa College talking about preparing developers for new parallel programming paradigms.

At 3pm, I'll be at Kells Irish Pub in the Pearl District for a Pixel Bender tweetup.

Portland Pixel Bender Developers (or interested folk), C'mon down! Looking forward to meeting you. I'll be wearing the bright red Adobe jacket.

It is MAX time again, and this year looks like it will be over the top. There are some exciting things that will be shown related to Pixel Bender. None of which I can discuss right now, of course!

I'll be hosting a Pixel Bender Birds of a Feather on Wednesday at noon at Table 1. Please join us to discuss your Pixel Bender feature requests and ask any of your burning questions.

If you can't wait until Wednesday, tweet a message to @pixelbender (after Monday's keynote) and if I have time, I'd love to talk to any Pixel Bender developers who will be in Los Angeles during MAX.

See you in LA!

Last week, we posted a new revision of the Pixel Bender Toolkit (1.5.1) into the downloads area on Adobe labs. This version fixes a couple bugs from the previous release in exporting Pixel Bender Bytecode for Flash. Booleans should now work correctly.

A request we've had a few times on the Pixel Bender forum and over on twitter has been that we post the language reference and developer's guide separate from the Toolkit download itself. Those documents are now available as well on the downloads page.