So, I downloaded the Flash Player 10 Beta and the Pixel Bender Toolkit and I must say, it’s fun. I have yet to do anything truly productive with it, but as a creative tool or something that shows the amazing possibilities of Flash 10 off, there isn’t a much better demo out there then downloading the tools, playing with them, exporting a PBJ file (yes, the Flash Filter ByteCode is called a PBJ – hehe.) and running it through the Pixel Bender Demo here. Read on to see some samples and download a few simple sketches. The filters work on still images, SWF animations and Video. Wowie wow! I did little playing with some color twisting while applying a threshold, you can get the source here and the PBJ for use in the demo here.

Here is a sample shot run through the filter…

So, after that I tried out some stretching pixels out. I used one of Juan Sanchez’s CS3 iPhone wallpapers for the source image file. Kinda made some nice bands…

My last little trial was a bit of a happy accident. I was simply messing around with the Fuzz filter I found in the Adobe Labs old Hydra pages. It turned out kind of prismatic. A bit like looking through the plastic of a reflector. Fun stuff. You can download the PBJ and the PBK files.

My fun with Pixel Bender is just beginning. I have a feeling that as the tool matures and some real geniuses get their hands on it, we’ll see some mind blowing stuff done in Flash Player 10. I for one am really looking forward to seeing what Mario Kilngemann does with this. His seam carving stuff and some of his other pixel experiments with the convolution and displacement filters tell me he is the perfect guy to bend some pixels. Or at least whisper to them.

I do have a few requests and/or issues with the toolkit thus far… In no particular order:

• A better IDE, please. Maybe make an Eclispse plugin? Without a proper IDE, auto-complete and all the other things I have become reliant on in Eclipse (search and replace, etc), it will quickly become unmanageable writing a filter of any real complexity in the limited toolkit’s editor.
• More more more documentation, samples and help! Probably not much need of explanation here needed, but for me (like many other Flash designers), coming from a ECMA dot syntax type world (AS, JavScript, PHP) This C like syntax is a real hurdle for me. I’d like a comprehensive list of the functions, operators etc, but with actual explanations.
• How about packaging a local version of the Pixel Bender Demo, but maybe wrapped up as an AIR app? Or, if it could be targeted from inside of the IDE as a “Run Live” option next to the “Run” button, even better.
• If filter development/creation is as similar as described to writing AE filters, as it is mentioned in the Pixel Bender documents, why not include some examples showing the correlations for more context? I don’t have any AE filter source code resident on my machine, but I’d like to learn a bit about it, seeing the similarities between some examples. I’m sure this could really jump start filter creation for many people.

All in all, though, I am really psyched. What a great powerful tool for creativity. One thing I am really thinking will be fun will be to get the new Flex Builder SWC for targeting Flash Player 10 installed and building a UI to use these filters. I want wire ‘em up to Tweener! Woohoo, target-able, animate-able filters for all yer display object tweaking needs. Thinking of the possibilities for transitions, game effects, etc is just mind boggling. Good times for us Flash geeks.

Posted on May 19, 2008

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