Hi Adobe!

Thanks for making such a fun technology. I don’t get access to the good stuff because I focus primarily on Flash, but it’s still a cool challenge to work under the constraints to make Flash effects no one has ever seen before.

It’s clear that the Toolkit was meant as a simple IDE for Pixel Bender, and it works pretty well. I just have some requests for the next version. You probably have these all jotted down, but just in case you haven’t thought of one yet:

  • Code Snippet Generator: It would be great to click a button to generate some boilerplate actionscript to instantiate a compiled Pixel Bender and supply it with the currently selected parameter values from the right interface.
  • Mapping “Load Image” functionality to actual image input variable names. I don’t know if there is a bug but sometimes I experience oddness when trying to load the right images in the right order? I think the Toolkit gets confused as to which Image # is assigned to which image input parameter. If I could just assign an image based on the input param name I chose, that would solve that.
  • This might exist, but is there a way to define a parameter so that the individual vector elements can be assigned names? So for a float3, rather than [0], [1], [2] I could choose “R” “G” and “B”, etc. Better yet, actual properties of a dynamic object, so I can assign shader.data.myParam.value = {x: 30, y: 30, z: 30} rather than [30, 30, 30]. I know this would be a change to the Shader object model but hey, I can dream right?
  • The ability to choose an image as a background behind the pixel bender outputs rather than just a background color. Or better yet, a bonafied SWF file in Play mode.
  • In Preferences, I’d like to set a 3rd folder for exporting Pixel Bender kernels for flash (PBJ). I keep the PBK and PBJ files in totally different areas so it would improve my workflow a lot if I could control these separately.

That’s it … for now. Muahaha. ;)