Hydra considerations
While experimenting with the AIF toolkit i noticed some glitches that could be taken into consideration by the AIF team before going final with the release:
- it seems that image-type function parameters are bound to the selected images according to their alphabetical order, instead of the natural user-defined one: for instance, create a new kernel as here, select two images and refresh; you should be now looking at the image you loaded via “Load Image 2…”: now rename “in image4 srca” to be “in image4 srcc” and refresh. Wrongly, you are now looking at the first image
- the GUI doesn’t release cpu/gpu resources while minimized in order to relieve the machine from the rendering process
Aside that, i’m looking forward to try all this cool stuff with Astro!
Hydra is here!
Finally the Adobe team released the Hydra’s tech-preview package, available for download right here: reading the documentation, there are some cool things that aren’t expected to work in the Flash player, anyway Hydra signify a huge step forward for the Flash technology, enabling the next Flash Player for custom bitmap filters, blend modes and a bunch of exciting new stuff! Also, congrats to Joa as he wrote the first non-Adobe hydra filter!
I had some difficulties installing the package since it was keep asking to terminate another Adobe installation, anyway i managed to install the beast and give it a try: i wanted to simulate a “glassy look-through” effect (as you are watching something outside of a glass door): it goes without saying there is the need to use some of the “region needed” magic in order to crop the black borders out, but i have no time at the moment, so here it is.
In order to use this filter you’ll have to download the kernel source and these three images:
Basically, once you launched the AIF Toolkit, you load the hydra source, then the shower as the first image, and then choose one of the two normal maps as the second image, press F5 and try play with the parameters.