I was having a problem with loading the filter when I uploaded it to the webserver – it wasn’t loading in even though it was in the same directory as the .swf

I have been through Lee’s excellent demo of Pixel Bender, and yes indeed I find it really slow:

I have animated Lees blur filter demo with the code below, it is set to only update twice per second and yet after running for only a short while it slows down even further… Any ideas why?

Nice work Mike!

P.S This is compiling in Flash CS4 and so not wrapped in a package – which I think is right?

import flash.display.*;
import flash.events.*;
import flash.filters.*;
import flash.net.*;
import flash.utils.ByteArray;

// SWF Metadata
[SWF(width="1024", height="424", backgroundColor="#000000", framerate="2")]

//the file that contains the binary bytes of the PixelBender filter
[Embed("blur1.pbj", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
var TestFilter:Class;

//The image to display the filter on
[Embed(source="image.jpg")]
var image:Class;
var im:Bitmap;

var a=0;
var inout=0;

addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, loop);

function loop(e:Event):void
{
PB();
}

function PB():void
{
im = new image() as Bitmap;
addChild(im);

//Pass the loaded filter to the Shader as a ByteArray
var shader:Shader = new Shader(new TestFilter() as ByteArray);
shader.data.amount.value = [a];
var filter:ShaderFilter = new ShaderFilter(shader);

//add the filter to the image
im.filters = [filter];
if (inout ==0)
{
a = a+1;
if (a>10)
{
inout =1;
}
}
else
{
a = a-1;
if (a<0)
{
inout =0;
}
}
}

http://pradeekonflex.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/dynamically-changing-pixel-blender-data-at-runtime/

Yeah, we will be doing more work on this in the tools and Flex 4, so stay tuned.

mike chambers

mesh@adobe.com

While it could be useful to have these reusable “pbj” nuggets, in some ways it would have been a lot simpler to bundle that whole process into the compiler (in a similar way to mxml getting converted into AS3 at compile time).