Pixel Bender Command Line

Posted on October 15, 2008 by keith

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.

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6 Responses to Pixel Bender Command Line

  1. Robert M. Hall says:
    October 15, 2008 at 8:49 pm

    Hey Keith,

    Agree – sometimes its great just to get the raw-metal portions made available and let us build on top, sometimes its great the other way around – its definitely nice to have the freedom though.

    Speaking of a higher level tool for Pixel Bender, have you seen Conduit yet? http://lacquersoftware.com/conduit/pixelbender/

    It looks to me like Conduit is to Pixel Bender as Quartz Composer is to Mac development, or the approach that Mario and the guys have taken in Aviary – pluggable patch based GUI – looks pretty sweet.

    See ya,
    Rob

  2. David Wilhelm says:
    October 15, 2008 at 9:18 pm

    I had already switched to MacVim for editing .pbk files (c syntax works fine) . But cutting & pasting is a pain – can’t wait to smack the F10 key to compile em, as I do with .as files. Thanks for the heads up – I’ll be checking for it on labs.

  3. doug says:
    October 16, 2008 at 6:18 am

    Hi Keith,

    When is your new chapter to be included in the book?

    Cheers

  4. Dave Jeffery says:
    October 17, 2008 at 5:12 am

    Well, I can only hope that whoever does write us some nice PixelBender tools remembers to ensure they read like a love letter and make us cry…

  6. Matt says:
    March 9, 2009 at 8:04 pm

    So are there any FREE editors available? I would much rather just stick to the bare bones editor if the alternative is to pay for one… As for the conduit editor, I find actually making the code myself to be much more satisfying and fun than having something do it for me.

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