This evening, I stumbled across a great example of some new animation effects possibilities in Flex 4, based on AnimateTransitionShader and PixelBender (pixel shader) effects. I normally try not to just refer to someone else's code example, but these are too cool to not share...

First, take a look at the output, and then you can dig in and see how it all works. The first example uses a hexagonal tiling pixel bender shader to animate a transition between two states.

The second uses a twist shader to perform a transition that is very reminiscent of the mac "genie" effect.

Essentially, the new AnimateTransitionShader animates a transition between two bitmap images using pixel bender shaders. It "grabs" the bitmap data of the before and after states of a transition, and uses pixel bender shaders to apply a transition. The best part is that you just specify the transition effect like you would any other Flex animation effect.

You can check out the full post, along with code samples at the original blog post:

http://www.justsuppose.com/getting-fancy-with-flex-4/

This is the first working example that I have seen of the AnimateTransitionShader class using PixelBender filters, and I must admit that it looks very cool, and very promising.

Read more from Andrew Trice.