Iterating a pixel bender plugin?

[Dan Ebberts]

Hmmm…. I don’t see how that could work. AE is designed so that you can just click anywhere on the timeline and it will display that frame. But in this case, it would need data that doesn’t exist because previous frames weren’t rendered. My guess is that you’d need to do it with a conventional (C++) plugin where you could get the data from the first frame and iterate it up to the current frame.

Dan

[Matthew Woods]

I know there are effects that work like this. Particle effects for example work based on the previous frame (or data from the previous frame). They usually render fast from the start, but take awhile if you try to cut into the middle (presumably because they have to calculate the prior frames).

You might be right though that there is no way to do it with pixel bender or expressions. For now, I am using screen grabs from another program running a life simulation.

Still curious if anyone has an idea how to make the plug-in work in AE. I’d like to get into Pixel Bender more. It seems really powerful.

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[Todd Kopriva]

Dan is right that the best way to go about this is with the C/C++ plug-in SDK.

Pixel Bender is great as an image processing platform, but you’re asking for something very different.

You’ll notice that there aren’t any particle system plug-ins written with Pixel Bender.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
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