ActionScript 3.0 Bible

Chapter 38. Writing Shaders with Pixel Bender

FEATURED CLASSES

• flash.display.Shader

• flash.display.ShaderJob

• flash.display.ShaderData

• flash.filters.ShaderFilter

Pixel Bender, a cross-product toolkit for image processing, opens a whole new set of possibilities in Flash Player version 10 and above. You can use Pixel Bender to generate graphics, to filter display objects, to create custom blend modes, and even to process heaps of nonimage data. Pixel Bender uses its own language entirely separate from ActionScript 3.0, and it is compiled before being used in Flash Player. In this chapter, you'll learn about the ways Pixel Bender can enhance your Flash applications, how to load and use Pixel Bender programs in ActionScript, and how to program in the Pixel Bender kernel language.

Note

FP10. Only Flash Player 10 and up can execute Pixel Bender kernels. Future versions of Flash Player may add support for Pixel Bender features not currently available, such as dependent values, region functions, loops, arrays, variable vector indices, and so on.

Introducing Pixel Bender

Pixel Bender is a pixel shader (or fragment shader, sometimes) system developed for use across Adobe Creative Suite products. In theory, you can use the same shader as a filter in Photoshop, After Effects, and during runtime in Flash Player. A pixel shader is a short program whose output is the color of a given pixel. When an area affected by a pixel shader needs to be rendered, the system runs the program on each pixel that needs ...