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?

Then I stumbled upon Shader Toy, by Inigo Quilez (whom I’ve mentioned several times on this blog). A couple of things make Shader Toy stand out:

It runs inside your browser. It uses the emerging WebGL standard, which is JavaScript bindings for OpenGL (ES) 2.0. OpenGL can be used directly inside a Canvas HTML element, including support for custom shaders. As Shader Toy demonstrates, this makes it possible to do some very impressive stuff, such as real-time GPU-accelerated raytracing inside an element on a web page.

The examples are great. While Shader Toy itself is mostly a thin wrapper around the WebGL functionality, the great thing about it is the example shaders: 2D fractals and Demo Scene effects, but also complex examples like the Slisesix 4K demo, and examples of raytracing, and complex fractals, like the Quaternion Julia set, and the Mandelbulb.

The only problem with WebGL is, that it is not supported by the current generation of browsers.

The good news is that the nightly builds of Firefox, Safari (WebKit), and Chromium (Google Chrome) all support it, and are quite easy to install: this is a good place for more information. If you use the Chromium builds, you don’t have to worry about messing up your existing browser configuration – the nightly builds are standalone versions and can be run without installation.

There are lots of complex shader tools out there: for instance, NVIDIAs FX Composer, AMDs Rendermonkey, TyphoonLabs OpenGL Shader Designer, and Lumina, but Shader Toy makes it very easy to get started with shaders. And it provides a rare insight into how those amazing 4K demos were made.