Genie in a bottle
Posted in Adobe, Development, Platogo | By Christoph Atteneder |
During the development of one of our new games for Platogo we got our hands dirty with Adobe´s Pixel Bender technology. In short, Pixel Bender is a technology to create programmable effects that run fast. They can be used for Flash, Photoshop and After Effects. You can create awesome effects with just a few lines of code. As a simple example we tried re-creating Apple´s Genie Effect for windows closure.The current implementation only needs 10 lines of code and is not even optimized. If there is interest we will post the final animated effect including the Pixel Bender Code in a few days. So don´t wait any longer, download the Pixel Bender Toolkit, install Joa Ebert's Eclipse Plugin (PBDT) and try this new technology by yourself.
[Update]
Because of the massive response we have implemented a little example and also added the source of our Pixel Bender Kernel to the blog entry.
There are a lot of possibilites to improve performance and we are looking forward to your input. The principle behind the Kernel is pretty easy. We´ve used a bezier curve to decide which pixel has to be transparent and where we´ve to compress the pixels. That´s all the magic.
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Pixel Bender Kernel Source Code: Download Genie Effect Pixel Bender Kernel
[/Update]
May 13th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Nice thing – seeing pb popping up at a lot of places
May 13th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
I’d be interested to see the source, that is very cool, good job!
May 13th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
+1 for seeing the final animated effect and the pixel bender kernel source.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
looks great on your platogo screen!
May 16th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
I am doing a transition engine in flash for slideshows with pixel bender. demo.om-labs.com/iifetxPlayer . The third and fourth effects are made with the genie effects that I and my mentor did in january. lol!! coming from xp to macs i was mad after the mac genie so we decided to recreate it in flash.
Its nice to know people are also thinking along the same lines. I’ll talk with my boss to see if I can release the genie effect on pixel bender gallery with a non-commercial licence.
June 14th, 2009 at 8:35 am
@noj: great effects. i like the second with thex axis smear a lot!
April 2nd, 2012 at 1:10 pm
Hi,
I’m a flex developer, and would like to test the animation that you posted.
Can you also put or send me some runner code to be able to run the affect ?
Best regards!
April 2nd, 2012 at 1:17 pm
Hi Hamazasp,
As I’ve implemented the code a few years ago I’m not sure if I’m able to find the test project anymore.
But the pixelbender file should be easily to integrate. I’ll let you know if I’m able to find the source code for the example somewhere.
Best,
Christoph