Slides / Demos / Special effects whiz-bangery / Where to learn more

Pixel Bender is so hot right now (having a Zoolander moment) and was a late addition to the WebDU agenda due to demand and interest from WebDU conference delegates. Geoff aptly titled the session “Mixing it up in the Pixel Bender”, but Pixel Bender can be much more than just blending (or is it bending) pixels. Either way, you can bend, warp, create, mixup, mashup not only pixels but all purpose mathematics as well, allowing you to perform complex calculations in a separate thread within Flash.

But it extends beyond Flash!

Pixel Bender provides a common video and image processing infrastructure as found in After Effects. It is the runtime and pixel shader language that allows you to perform cool filters on your After Effects compositions. The latest revision of Pixel Bender also brings with it a plug-in to Photoshop CS4, so now your Pixel Bender kernels can blend and bend in After Effects, Photoshop as well as Flash Player! All filters/shaders are developed with the Pixel Bender Toolkit. Awesomeness!

Take a look at the slides below, as well as the many Pixel Bender demos and resources that follow. Many of these demo’s were shown throughout the session. My favorite, although not applied to pixels, is Myna (the artist formerly known as Digimix) an audio mixing tool that’s part of the Aviary.com suite. Thanks to Alan Queen for demo access.

Presentation:

Demos shown:
Flash Globe using spherize filter and throw physics
Flash Globe using spherize filter and throw physics (source code)
Real time video color keying
Make your own water color painting (uses multiple filters)
JavaScript Pixel Bender explorer
Aviary Myna (the artist formerly known as Digimix) audio mixing tool
Using Pixel Bender to do heavy lifting of calculations

Where to learn more:
Pixel Bender on Adobe Labs
Kevin Goldsmith’s blog
Pixel Bender lab materials from Adobe MAX 2008

Pixel Bender Community:
Pixel Bender Exchange
Follow Pixel Bender on Twitter

Thanks to everyone who attended my Pixel Bender session at WebDU this year. It was a fantastic conference as always, and brought together by another great effort by all the Daemonites. Big thanks to Geoff Bowers as always!

Related posts:

1. webDU 2008 presentations now available
2. Presenting at WebDU 2007
3. Begun, the code wars have