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360|Flex Indy Slides
The slides from my presentation on Pixel Bender at 360|Flex Indianapolis are available here. Thanks to those who attended, and thanks to Tom and John for putting on another great conference.
I'm not a big fan of just zipping up all my source files and tossing out a download link because without some context, sample code isn't generally very useful. Instead, I'll be doing several blog posts over the next few weeks with some detailed explanation to go with the code, so keep checking back.
If you have any questions about the material I presented, or just Pixel Bender or Flex in general, send them over. I'd love to help.
Pixel Bender Blend Modes
In preparation for my Pixel Bender talk at 360Flex I wanted to create an example which shows how to use Pixel Bender shaders as blend modes, so I went ahead and whipped together 20 blend shaders: Darken, Multiply, Color Burn, Linear Burn, Lighten, Screen, Color Dodge, Linear Dodge (Additive), Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light, Difference, Exclusion, Interpolation, Invert, Quadratic, and Subtract.
You'll notice there is some overlap with the set that are natively available in flash.display.BlendMode, but I thought it would be pretty educational to see how these shaders are written Pixel Bender. I have yet to test to see if there is a significant performance difference.
The formulas behind these blend modes were pretty easy to find. I got them from a combination of http://www.pegtop.net/delphi/articles/blendmodes, http://dunnbypaul.net/blends/, wikipedia and the Flash docs.
One topic I wasn't able to find much documentation on was how to handle alpha channels for the various blend modes. It gets complicated if both layers have transparency, and I'm not sure if there is a standardized way of computing the resulting alpha. So for these examples the alpha is simply set to that of the input image. This means that these blend modes work perfectly for opaque images, but vary from what you might see in photoshop when transparency is involved. If anyone has any good resources on the topic or would like to contribute to this effort, let me know in the comments.
Quickly Access Adobe Help Docs in Eclipse
I had someone ask me today about an easy way to open up a specific topic in the Adobe help docs when writing code in Eclipse. The quickest method is to click on or select a class, property or method and press Shift+F2. This will open up the docs in a new window.
An alternative would be to click the "Show View as a fast view" icon in the lower left hand corner of the Eclipse window and choose "Help". When the Help view pops up, make sure "Related Topics" is selected. To hide a fast view, simply click anywhere outside of it. Now, if you click on or select a class, property or method and then click the Help fast view - it will display a list of help topics that are related to your selection. This approach may not be as quick or graceful as Shift+F2, but the advantage is that it offers links to related articles in addition to the regular as docs.
See it in action:
Please keep in mind that these techniques will only give you the official Adobe documentation. Your docs, and 3rd party library docs will not show up in the help view.
If anyone has any other fancy tricks, let us know in the comments.
360|Flex – Let’s Do This Thing
Tom and John have just completed the huge task of sorting through 130+ submissions and I am honored to have been chosen as a speaker at 360|Flex Indiana. My session is called "Bending and Flexing" and will be all about using Pixel Bender and Flex. It's slated to be a 200 level talk so all levels of Flex and Pixel Bender experience are welcome. Here's the full description:
Learn how to use Adobe’s Pixel Bender technology to trick out your applications with a limitless variety of effects and transitions. Write pixel shaders with the Pixel Bender Toolkit and integrate them into Flex. Bring your shaders to life using the Flex effects library and other popular tweening libraries. Leverage Pixel Bender’s processing power for non-visual computations. Discover the pros and cons of using Pixel Bender vs. traditional AS3 approaches. Expect lots of demos and open source code to play with.
Now that I'm committed to a topic I'm going to be putting together a lot more demos and tutorials, so keep an eye out on my blog for a sneak peek at some of the content. Anybody want to make me a "Bending and Flexing" logo? For a free t-shirt perhaps?
The full schedule can be found at http://360conferences.com/360flex/downloads/schedule.pdf and tickets are available at http://360flex.eventbrite.com. Tickets are on a first come first served basis and are much cheaper if you buy early, so don't put it off until the last minute.
Vote For Sessions at 360|Flex
It's that time of year again when speakers are being chosen for the upcoming 360|Flex in Indiana (May 18-20). Because of an overwhelming number of submissions, John Wilker has put them up on a voting site so you can help decide which sessions you want to see. How many other conferences let you do that?
I submitted two alternate sessions: Lighten your Load – Tips and Tricks for Asset Loading and Management, and Bending and Flexing. For some reason though, both of mine have been marked complete so they are closed for voting. In any case, now is your chance to voice your oppinion, just click this link.