One of the neatest additions to Expression Blend 3 is the Effects pane. You’ll find it in the Asset panel.
This makes it dead simple to add an effect to an item on the Blend Artboard. Just drag the effect onto the desired item and you get an instant effect.
The effect is easy to configure, as Blend provides a panel on the Properties pane.
What the problem then?
Unfortunately Blend only ships with two shader effects; BlurEffect and DropShadowEffect. If you want any other shader you have to write your own. The good news is that WPF exposes a ShaderEffect base class that you can use. The bad news is you have to learn another programming language, HLSL, and use it to write the DirectX shader code. If you are a developer it’s not that hard to create your own effects but it is definitely not something a designer is going to want to tackle.
As most of my regular readers know I’ve written a tool (Shazzam) to make it simple to create and test shaders. Over the last year I’ve collected a library of shaders, most of them from Microsoft, that I include as samples in Shazzam.
Announcing ShaderGallery
I thought it would be a good idea to add these shaders to Expression Blend. I talked to a few of my WPF Disciple buddies, they thought it was a great idea too. I pinged Adam Kinney and a couple of Microsoft friends and asked them if they knew of anyone developing a Blend effects library. Adam said, “No, I don’t know of any but would love to have one.”
So in the end I decided to create ShaderGallery. It is a free add-in for Expression Blend that contains ~25 effects.
Shipping Date
The goal is to have the application done by opening day at PDC09 (November 17th). The shaders are done. All that’s left to do on the project is get the designer interaction code finished, so that Expression Blend works correctly when editing the shader properties.
[...] Comments « ShaderGallery – Free effects add-in for Expression Blend [...]
Excellent work Walt
Sacha. You might want to wait until I’ve shipped to the product, to see if it’s worthwhile. :>
Thanks!, last saturday night I was playing with shazzam and asked myself, why it couldn’t be implemented right in Blend?. I’m designer, with some developer background, but definitively designer. I lost six hours trying to implement a custom shader in a Silverlight project… at 5 AM I left it, it was impossible!. He, he… too complex for my left brain way of life.
Blend have advanced a lot since it’s first incarnation… but as I’ve made a big effort to sharpen my right analytic side to accomodate concepts as “Visual States” or “Event Bubbling” I still hope to see more “designer oriented” enhacements.
Look forward to seeing this, any idea on when it will be ready?
Wow this would be perfect! Any updates on when you will release?
This is a great idea. Has this already been released or are you still waiting on something? Thanks!
This looks really awesome. Has this been released anywhere? I can’t seem to find any download links.
Not yet, I am working with the Blend team to make it happen though.
Hi,
Excellent job. I have a request, if you can make reflection effect it would be great and relax for most of the designers. If you have made so, please share.
Thanks
D Patra
Any news yet on a release date?