I just finished writing a chapter on Pixel Bender for AdvancED ActionScript 3.0 Animation. Really fun stuff. One thing that’s unignorable is the … klunkiness of the Pixel Bender Toolkit. It’s not that it’s particularly buggy or anything, just really, really, REALLY bare bones. The Flash CS4 code editor seems like heaven after coding shaders for a while.
But I just noticed this on Kevin Goldsmith’s blog:
We’re adding another tool to the Pixel Bender authoring arsenal. There have been a bunch of 3rd party developers who want to create tools that generate Pixel Bender. To make it easier for them, we’ll be releasing a command-line utility that will allow you to compile a Pixel Bender Kernel file into a Pixel Bender Bytecode file. The work on this is complete. Look for this on labs very soon.
That’s really great. I know some people don’t agree, but I think the strategy of giving the community the low level tools, and let them make the high level tools is fantastic.