Finally I could get my hands a little bit dirty with Hydra when my beloved spouse entrusted me her MacBook for a few hours. All my other machines don't support OpenGL 2.0 yet and thus I could just sit and watch Joa having all the fun.
What can I say after my first attempts? I definitely love it. The calculation speed is awesome. The language is really simple, especially if you have done bitmap manipulation with other tools or languages before. There are some nifty object types and overloaded operators which I wish that they would exist in Actionscript. Multiplying a point with a matrix with just a "*"? Perfect!
Of course the limitations for the usage within Flash are a real bummer at first. No loops? No arrays? No nested operations inside of conditionals? Well, on the other hand limitations like these can be a real creativity booster, too. And I already see some ways how to work around those.
So here are my first three Hydra filters which will be Flash enabled (that means no forbidden operations inside). I wish I could see them animated already.
| Radial Gradient |  |
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| Circular Gradient |  |
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| Spiral Gradient |  |
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