Do we need a pixel bender forum?

[ASWC]

Might be time to get into pixel bender and shader. Pixel bender filter development require some specific knowledge and has its own programming language it can then be imported into Flash (or other software) via shader and used for fast processing math operation like pixel based alteration. The question is do you believe it's gonna get bigger and bigger and so we need to be ready and already create a forum for this. I'll say yes!

I find pixel bender sort of half dead from the period that it came out till now. I''m not saying that the community isn't growing, I'm jjust saying that it hasn't come out as something great and revolutionary yet. For me, Pixel bender is one of those great ideas that somehow or rather just seems so secluded. Anyone gets the same feeling? (That there is potential in pixel bender that somehow or rather never becomes what it should have and is now lying dormant in a corner)

[evride]

nah i don't think that's true. It's just one more thing that adds to what you can do in Flash and other things. It's like Ribbit, Alchemy, Papervision, or FLARToolkit. You may not use it; your whole design studio may not use it; but for those that do use it, it's very handy and they can create very amazing things with it. It may just be that it wasn't well marketed or the people you know just don't care to use it. I actually do intend to use it soon, but I do not believe that there should be a whole section devoted to it. Maybe we should have an "Extended" section for all things not in the actual AS3 docentation. For example Pixel Bender, Away3d/Papervision, FLARToolkit, Alchemy, Ribbit, Jiglib/Box2d/FOAM/Other Physics classes, AlivePDF.

I agree with the "Extended" section part, especially for Swift3D and Papervision.

Also, I agree that pixel blender wasn't marketed well enough. There was much hype before lauch, but after launch, everything just seemed to quieten down so much that pixel bender just feels so... unused.

[wvxvw]

I don't know about any example of Pixel Bender use, but, if Alchemy is involved, then, well, I know about it's being used by one huge social framework site in it's image uploader tool (all the SWFs I've ever compiled in total hadn't had as many views as that one gets in a week ). So, as evride says: it is not dead, the fact you don't use it doesn't prove it's useless, but, maybe, a forum for it would be a dead brunch, like HaXe forum...

[ASWC]

Well it's not used because there's not a lot of tutorial about it and because it's only available now for FP10. However its development is increasing on all platform supporting it. For Flash some functionality are still not supported but more will be added later, for someone looking for speed kick then shader is the s**t. You have the ability to pass all your math calculation to the GPU using shaderJob in its own thread making it not dependent on Flash rendering timing. I'll soon write a tutorial about it. But I don't think it's fair to say something is dead when it barely had 6 months of existence!

[ASWC]

Originally Posted by wvxvw

I don't know about any example of Pixel Bender use,

Why don't you download my little swf?

[wvxvw]

Originally Posted by ASWC

Why don't you download my little swf?

I mean I haven't seen it anywhere unless on Adobe Labs / some other dedicated forums / user group pages etc...

BTW. Your example played at it's double size almost killed my 2.13x2 Intel
poor al'pro... Attachment 32406

[ASWC]

sorry about that, it's actually not using shaderJob at all so no GPU access for this example. That was just to show the possibilities as applied to bitmap manipulation. That's like 10 lines of code for the effect, I really think it's pretty cool!!!!

[ASWC]

Here is the non optimized GPU version. It might still run slow depending on your GPU power but it won't kill your CPU this time!