Pixel Bender Plasma

Year: 2009
Tools: Flash, Pixel Bender

After doing the plasma effect in pure AS3 code using setPixel() on a BitmapData object. I thought, that this must be relatively easy to archive with Adobes Pixel Bender. So I made this my first Pixel Bender project...

After reading a little bit in the documentation I found out that Pixel Bender isn't that complicated as I first thought it is. The plasma kernal was done in half an hour.

It took me longer to find out how to use the kernel with flash. After searching a while I found a good explanation. And here it is.

 

This experiment opend a lage door for me and I have a lot of ideas now, what I want to try out with Pixel bender and Flash. As you can see, the filters are very performant (compared to pure AS3 code). So, I started building my own filter-library for Flash with some yet simple but cpu hungry effects.

 

Pixelbender also pique my interest in shaders in general. So I also started looking into GLSL. One outcome was e.g. a "metaball" CoreImage filter.