As you might have noticed I updated the logo and fixed a few things in the CSS.
While I was working on those I realized that this blog is more then a year old: I started it the mid March last year with a very informative first post.
My god, how time flies… I’m getting older at an alarming (yet, standard) rate.

Anyways, I also made a distance field generator in PixelBender. This famous Valve paper explains the basic idea very well, but only scrapes the surface: distance fields can be used for much more. My next tutorial will be about the practical uses of DFs, implemented in the Unreal engine.
However the generator filter is available right now: DistanceField.pbk.

Installation:

- Download and Install Pixel Bender.
- Copy the .pbk file to the Pixel Bender Files directory, located in the Photoshop folder.
- Open a black and white image.
- Start the filter from the filters menu.

There is a slider control called “Iterations", which controls the precision of the filter. By default it’s on a rather low number, because higher precision can cause the display driver to bail out. (The filter runs entirely on the GPU!)

It is recommended to gradually increase this value until it starts to take around 3 seconds to update the image. Beyond that point my GF8800 GT tends to crash, resetting the driver and killing PS (and only PS, the rest of the system is unaffected).
Smaller images are safer: I had no problems with 512x512 textures at all even at full precision.

The Adobe guys know about the problem and are trying to work something out.

Fortunately this issue has less significance when it comes to real life usage: The generated image is often scaled down considerably, where the loss of precision has little or no impact on the final image.

Still, please let me know if you encounter other bugs.