Pixel Bender 3D

Adobe has announced Pixel Bender 3D:

If I understand it correctly, it is a new API for Flash, and not as such a direct extension of the Pixel Bender Toolkit. So what does it do?

As far as I can tell, it is simply a way to write vertex and fragment shader for Flash. While this is certainly nice, I think Adobe is playing catchup with HTML5 here – many browsers already support custom shaders through WebGL (in their development builds, at least). Or compare it to a modern 3D browser plugin such as Unity, with deferred lightning, depth-of-field, and occlusion culling…

And do we really need another shader language dialect?

Flash raytracer

Kris Temmerman (Neuro Productions) has created a raytracer in Flash, complete with ambient occlusion and depth-of-field:

Kris has also produced several other impressive works in Flash:

Chaos Constructions

Quite and Orange won the 4K demo at Chaos Constructions 2010 with the very impressive ‘CDAK’ demo:

(Link at Pouet, including executable).

Ex-Silico Fractals

This YouTube video shows how to produce fractals without a computer. I’ve seen video feedback before, but this is a clever setup using multiple projectors to create iterated function systems.

Vimeo Motion Graphics Award

‘Triangle’ by Onur Senturk won the Vimeo Motion Graphics Award. The specular black material looks good. Wonder if I could create something similar in Structure Synth’s internal raytracer?