Aw man, Mr. Doob went ahead and made me all stoked about Pixel Bender again (and there goes my patience, curse your leet hide!). I went back to the parallax mapping effect from my last post to see if I could make it work more correctly in Pixel Bender (using the steep parallax algorithm). And since we’re using Flash Player 10 anyway, I made the surface rotate in 3D to illustrate the effect a bit better. Because of the lack of loops when using PB in FP10, it’s limited and some things could look a bit weird (especially since I’m exaggerating the effect here). Pixel Bender in Flash also has its speed limits, so this is still a cpu killer… As a result, I had to throw out the part handling lighting and self-shadowing

Enough rambling, here’s the demo (Flash Player 10 needed!):

• demo for FP10 browser plugin
• swf for the standalone player
• the source (including pixel bender code)

Time for another simple oldschool demo effect as an excuse to mess around with Pixel Bender So just like before, you need Player 10 if you’re interested in seeing the result. I only provided the swf this time, so if you don’t have it yet, grab the standalone player here and check the preview. Holding on to good habits, I also provided the source for the Pixel Bender kernel.

I swear, one of these days I’ll come up with something more meaningful!

Well, I suppose it couldn’t wait much longer… I just had to get my hands on Pixel Bender and do some tryouts. Initially, I set out to make a simple Mandelbrot set, which was pretty darn speedy in the Toolkit. However, once I turned on the Flash error checks, a few disappointments smacked me in the face. When used with Flash, it doesn’t support loops! Furthermore, it seems you can’t make images from scratch without involving a source sample as your output pixel (I’m not too sure about this, tho, I still have some research to do). So far for the Mandelbrot, coz I’d need both.

But, I quickly accepted those limitations, and started doing an old demo-effect instead; water ripples! It’s a fairly simple algorithm using a displacement map. The map image (the actual ripples) is rendered by Pixel Bender, based on the previous two iterations of the ripple algorithm. I was very excited to see how fast the result was. I can’t wait to be able to use PB for ‘real world’ projects once Flash Player 10 is released and settled in. Anyway, if you have Flash Player 10 installed as a browser plug-in, check out the demo here (you know, right-click views source, including the pixel bender src). If you don’t, but have a stand-alone player, get the demo here, and the source view here.