Combining PixelBender paint mixing with TUIO blob size

11 years ago

This post has been sitting around in draft for a while now so thought I’d better publish it. I finally got around to recording a video demo of an app I’ve been working on for a client. I needed to combine my PixelBender paint mixing with blob size so that the brush is the size of the object touching the screen. The video below demonstrates the app using TUIO and CCV. The final version will most likely be using GestureWorks and an Iduem screen.

Paint mixing with PixelBender

11 years ago

In my post yesterday I was demonstrating my attempt to create a drawing app using Stage3D for graphics acceleration. As it turns out Stage3D is not built for this kind of ‘per pixel’ manipulation on a drawing canvas. I mentioned at the end of the article that I might explore PixelBender as an alternative for the number crunching. So here it is, my first attempt at building my own Shader in PixelBender for paint mixing.

As you may already know, PixelBender is a a shader language built by Adobe that can be universally used between applications such as Flash Player, Photoshop and After Effects. It is based on the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) and is similar to C++. It can be used with Flash to create custom bitmap filters, effects or even to hand off some complex calculations. The great thing about using Pixel Bender is that it runs in a separate thread to Flash Player and can use multiple threads and even multiple cores. So the heavy lifting doesn’t lock up the Flash Player and can run parallel. This makes for some much, much faster processing.

READ MORE