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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

The problem: You or a team member exported a Flex project archive, and now you want to import it back into your workspace but you are receiving the following message -  A project with the same name already exists in your workspace. Rename or delete the existing project. It's nice of Eclipse not to allow you to overwrite an existing project, but an option to import it with a different project name would be nice.

The solution: Unzip your Flex project archive.  Open up the file called .project in a text editor (e.g. notepad).  Under <projectDescription> there should be an element called <name>.  Change this value to something unique within your workspace (appending a "2" usually does the trick).  Open Flex Builder and import the modified project.

Anyone know of a more automated solution?

As an R&D project, one of our .NET guys created cashforyourmustache.com using Silverlight.  Now the the general public can rate the progress of each individual’s growth.  This is the pinnacle of facial hair monitoring technology, the Interactive Transitional Community Hair Evolving Engine (aka the ITCHEE app). In mid December the final design will be posted of each person’s mustache. The winner of the contest will receive a cash prize along with all the bragging rights entitled therein.  Of course I can count on you - the readers of my blog to give me high ratings, right?

Don't forget, you need the Silverlight plugin to view the site.

http://www.cashforyourmustache.com

My only criticism is that Flex effects in general tend to have lackluster performance.  I frequently use libraries like TweenLite instead.  Can TweenLite play nicely with Pixel Bender effects?  Of course.  I'll do an example of that sometime this week.

• ambientColor - color to apply to all pixels of the image
• angle - angle at which the spotlight is projected (in degrees)
• azimuth - angle between the image plane and the spotlight (in degrees)
• coneAngle - angle of the spotlight's "opening" (in degrees)
• distance - distance from the spotlight to the center point
• intensity - intensity of the spotlight
• position - x, y, z position of the spotlight
• spotColor - color of the spotlight

There are so many different ways that you could use this effect, I will probably devote a few more posts to showing additional examples.  In this demo, I created a couple of draggable handles that you can use for positioning the spotlight, and some preset configurations (try the dawn, day, and dusk buttons).  Next time, I'll incorporate some animation.

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• center ([0-2048, 0-2048]) - the center coordinates of the magnified area
• outerRadius (0-500) - the radius of the magnified part of the image
• innerRadius (0-500) - the radius of the fully magnified part of the image
• magnification (1-50) - the amount to magnify the image by (e.g. set to 2 for a 2x magnification)

Note that the ranges specified above are just the recommendations from the .pbk file, you can set these values to whatever you want in your application.

Take some time and play around with the settings, it is possible to acheive a several different effects.  If innerRadius is 0, it creates a "bubble".  If it is higher than outerRadius, then you get a hard edged circle.  In this demo, I disabled values between 0 and 1 for magnification because they can create some strange side effects, but if you are careful you can use fractional magnifications to create a "pinch" type effect.

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