Adobe Pixel Bender?

vvvv beta question
1

Hi there,
Just been reading up about the new pixel bender in Adobe CS4 that can use the GPU. It uses the XML language apparently, but I’ve also seen demo videos where you can use the adobe software GUI to create your effects.

Is this similar to the HLSL shaders used in vvvv?

Is there any chance of using a a pixel bender shader in vvvv, or maybe even designing a shader effect in photoshop and then letting vvvv use it later in realtime?

I’m a newb beginning to learn about pixel/vertex shaders and all that jazz, and was just wondering about this…

John

2

i’d be interested in facts regarding this, too.

all i can assume is that it is using shader technology in some way; no idea wether it is an abstraction of GLSL or a homebrew. but since it’s the same technology they’ve used for the filters in the mac os photobooth, which my low-level macbook handles just fine (e.g. without melting), i suspect this to be a gpu operation.

let’s hope that the workflow they’ve laid out is open enough to sneak some legible shader language in & out.

3

I’ve had a quick look at it, its partly glsl, and a bit of c like code, its fairly simple, if you know code, but I don’t to well! Like most of these things, it understanding the maths behind it thats tricky! Theres an sdk on the cs4 install disks I think if you want to check it out (and have cs4!)

4

Since you can embed Flash 10 in vvvv I assume you can also use Pixel Bender. I can think of two reasons you’d want to do this:

  1. re-use an existing flash pixel-bender animation
  2. you want to use Flash to create a really cool front-end and the only way to incorporate the gpu (at a low level) in Flash is to use pixel-bender.

However, I suspect pixel-bender isn’t quite as powerful as using shaders since it’s cross-platform.