Actionscript3, Flash, Java, C#, C++, Algorithms & Imageprocessing
Ralph Hauwert put a very interesting blog post up no his blog about Adobe Alchemy. Basically he was reading my mind with this post.
I want to a step further now. But please keep in mind that I am definitly not a compiler expert or have deep knowledge of the Flash Player. Everything I write about is in my opinion common sense and comes from a long time of reverse engineering and autodidactic learning.
PixelBender Outline is a simple view for Eclipse. It allows you to browse through compiled PixelBender kernel files (pbj). Usually it is quite annoying when working with PixelBender. You always have to debug the shader if you did not write it yourself to know about parameters and stuff. The PixelBender Outline view allows you to navigate through that information in a comfortable way.
PixelBender Outline is working with FDT only. Just grab the JAR file and place it into your Eclipse plugins folder (…/Eclipse/plugins/) to install it. After restarting Eclipse you can open the view using Window->Show View->Other->PixelBender->PixelBender Outline.
The outline is updated everytime you select a *.pbj file in the Flash Explorer.
Tinic posted today his PixelBender assembler and disassembler. This makes me happy, because now I can post an experiment I could not show for a while.
If you know PixelBender, than you know that you can not create loops. What you could do is unroll all constant loops with a fixed length. If you know simple convolution filters like a blur, you know that you need an xy-loop and you know it should not be possible with PixelBender at all. Let me prove you wrong and have a look at dynamic loop unrolling with PixelBender (be careful with high values!).
I built a library to assemble and disassemble PixelBender kernels at runtime. I wrapped it also in a high level API so basically you can create a new Kernel by doing var kernel: Kernel = new Kernel();. Then when you need your shader as a ByteArray you simple call kernel.compile(). There are still some glitches here and there but I hope that I can release the source code pretty soon.
Another simple example here. I think it was a little bit hard for me to understand first how to do animations with Pixel Bender based on user input.
The user input is currently only a Math.random() but I think you will get the idea. I always put the output of the shader back into it and get a nice wave effect.
