I've been playing with it a bit (it integrates with Flex and FDT pretty well) and it is a cool alternative way to do Pixel Bender development.
Thanks to Joa for his contribution to the community!
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.
]]>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!
]]>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.
]]>I thought this would be of interest to everyone - I finally have the definitive guide on how matrix math works within Pixel Bender.
Pixel Bender matrixes are in column-major order. This means that this line:
float3x3 m = float3x3( a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i );
Sets up a matrix that looks like this:
a d g
b e h
c f i
If I access a matrix using a single [] operator I get these results:
m[ 0 ] == float3( a, b, c );
m[ 1 ] == float3( d, e, f );
m[ 2 ] == float3( g, h, i );
If I set up a vector like this:
float3 v = float3( X, Y, Z );
and do some vector / matrix or matrix / vector multiplications I get these results:
v * m == float3( Xa+Yb+Zc, Xd+Ye+Zf, Xg+Yh+Zi )
m * v == float3( Xa+Yd+Zg, Xb+Ye+Zh, Xc+Yf+Zi )
i.e. v * m does this calculation:
( X Y Z ) * a d g
b e h
c f i
while m * v does this calculation:
a d g X
b e h * Y
c f i Z
If we are multiplying two matrices together:
float3x3 m1 = float3x3( a, c, b, d, e, f, g, h, i );
float3x3 m2 = float3x3( J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R );
m1 * m2 does this calculation:
a d g J M P aJ+dK+gL aM+dN+gO aP+dQ+gR
b e h * K N Q == bJ+eK+hL bM+eN+hO bP+eQ+hR
c f i L O R cJ+fK+iL cM+fN+iO cP+fQ+iR
Some references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-major_order
http://everything2.com/title/Column+major+arrays+vs.+row+major+arrays
The MXML code is below:
All the action is in the ProcessAudio function, that pulls samples from the input file and executes a ShaderJob across them. There is something important to reference here:
effectShader.data["source"].width = BUFFER_SIZE / 1024; effectShader.data["source"].height = 512; effectShader.data["source"].input = shaderBuffer; effectShader.data["volume"].value = [ leftSlider.value, righttSlider.value ]; var effectJob:ShaderJob = new ShaderJob( effectShader, event.data, BUFFER_SIZE / 1024, 512 ); effectJob.start(true);
I pass the buffer into the shader job as a 2D buffer instead of a buffer with a height of one. This may make less sense logically, but the Flash player breaks the data up by rows for multi-threading, so this should make that perform faster.
Here is the kernel:
One thing to notice here is that rather than using an image2 as input and a pixel2 as output (which may make more sense logically again), I instead just use the buffer layout and process 2 stereo samples at the same time. This should also give you better performance for filters that can do this.
Here are the files:
For more info, the following references might be helpful
We were being a bit too idealistic :). It is completely true that the community of Pixel Bender developers continues to blow our minds at what they accomplish with the language and we never would have anticipated half the stuff that you guys are using Pixel Bender for. However, having some generally useful semantic meanings for Pixel Bender parameters would definitely help those who design general user interfaces for Pixel Bender filters.
One smart thing we did (if I do say myself) was to allow parameter and kernel metadata to be extensible. It provided developers like After Effects and Picnik a way to add custom metadata to Pixel Bender that specified semantics or actual UI controls for Pixel Bender kernels and graphs. The picnik metadata and the After Effects metadata are different though. I started to get concerned that by not having something around this that we could end up with many different Pixel Bender semantic metadata mechanisms floating around. To that end, I created the proposal below and started floating it around Adobe and some of the sites that are heavy users of Pixel Bender.
In this design, I tried to follow some general rules:
There are a couple open questions in the proposal that I'd like feedback on. They are called out pretty clearly. I'd really like your feedback on this proposal. I hope to issue the final version soon. Reply to this post or in the Pixel Bender forums on Adobe Labs. If you decide to post a reply on your own blog, please post a link to your post here or in the forum. Right now trackbacks are off so I won't know about it otherwise. You can also tweet a reply to the Pixel Bender twitter account (if you can fit it in 140 characters :) ).
Pixel Bender Metadata Hinting for User Interface Guidelines public proposal.pdf
]]>More info: http://seaflexug.org/
]]>At the 2009 Creative Suite Developer Summit. I gave a talk on the features of Pixel Bender that are important for doing Photoshop or After Effects filter development. That recording is here. You'll have to excuse my stammering, I had a major slide malfunction (inadvertently used a way early version of my slide deck).
We also had a really fun event, The Pixel Bender Iron Chef contest where developers from After Effects and the Adobe Image Foundation team challenged attendees in feats of Pixel Bender strength. That recording is here.
]]>Adobe Romania helped sponsor the 2009 Bucharest Best Engineering Competition for the Board of European Students of Technology. Miti taught introduced the students to Pixel Bender and below you see what they produced two hours later. He has a zip of the pixel bender kernels on his blog.
]]>I've been playing with it a bit (it integrates with Flex and FDT pretty well) and it is a cool alternative way to do Pixel Bender development.
Thanks to Joa for his contribution to the community!
You can get it from the Pixel Bender Technology area on Adobe Labs, and please let us know about any issues or suggestions for the next release in our forums, our Adobe Group or on twitter.
]]>
Ralph Hauwert wanted to see what he could do with Pixel Bender and Alchemy to get the most possible performance from the Flash Player. He created this experiment showing a 3D particle system using over 300,000 particles rendered in 3D in real time. More info and the demo on his blog.
Rob Skelly has a post on his blog showing how to use Pixel Bender for general purpose math. "So, does using Pixel Bender for math really help? Yes! In my simple tests, using Pixel Bender for collections of Numbers larger than a few hundred is at least 3x as fast and much better still for larger sets and more complex calculations. There is some overhead associated with setting up the shader objects, but depending on what you’re doing, the savings are definitely worth it."
Tom Beddard (the creator of the Esher Droste effect and the sweet Mandelbrot renderer in Pixel Bender) has dropped some new Pixel Bender coolness with a landscape raytracer! This is pretty neat and he also includes the source and some background on how he created it. Very nice.
Frank Reitberger has created a very trippy sphere generator with Pixel Bender and also includes the sources and a demo on his blog.
Aaron Conran decided to see what he could do using Pixel Bender, AIR and Explorer. The result is the Pixel Bender Explorer application. It also allows you to reference pbj files as effects in the wild to play with them. This app is a ton of fun.
David Lanaert has been experimenting with physical simulation in Flash using Alchemy and Pixel Bender. He created an web app called Farbe that lets you do watercolor simulation in Flash using Pixel Bender. It is really impressive, especially the performance he achieved. Really inspiring to play around with!
Thanks to everybody in the community who continues to push the bounaries using Pixel Bender. We have some very exciting stuff that we're working on that will help you create a whole new generation of awesomeness! Stay tuned!
]]>For more information: http://cooljobs.adobe.com/frameset.html?goto=er-viewjob&refnode=440636
]]>More info in my previous post or go straight to the contest page on the NVidia website!
]]>