Parallax Mapping with Pixel Bender (still burning cpu’s)
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
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!):

