Pixel Bender and Flash

I just finished writing a chapter on Pixel Bender for my next book. It’s really fun stuff. Unfortunately, its integration with Flash is quite minimal. There was some discussion of this type of thing in the comments of another post here. A lot of the features pushed into the player this round have little or no authoring environment (IDE) visibility. Like the new Sound API. It’s all code.

So, if you want to use a Pixel Bender shader as a filter, you need to do it via code. No way around that. No way to get a PB shader filter to show up in your filter drop down list. I didn’t expect there would be. So my plan was to write a SWF panel that would let you load in .pbj files and use JSFL to apply them to the selected stage instance. But even this is not possible. Just no JSFL access to anything Pixel Bender related.

I’m not really complaining. The ability to use Pixel Bender shaders in Flash at all is really cool. And I’d be doing it with code anyway. If it were up to including it as is, or waiting til Flash 11 before we could use it at all, I’m glad we have at least code access anyway.

I just thought I’d be able to write a tool that would allow the more designer-y types to have fun with new filters too. But not yet. You could write a tool that would spit out the code necessary to use a filter, but there’d be no live preview, and it would be pretty klunky overall.

Adobe does plan to roll out more IDE support for these new features. Whether that means in the next version of Flash, or something intermediate, we’ll have to wait and see.