Has anyone tried their hand at a shader that would soften up the view? Prince of Persia: The Sand of Time uses something like this to give it that storybook, wispy feel:

http://www.princeofpersiagame.com/

A comparable look, in film, would be from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow..it makes heavy use of it:

http://www.skycaptain.com/downloads/SkyCaptain07_1024x768.jpg

http://www.skycaptain.com/downloads/SkyCaptain03_1024x768.jpg

Yes please someone help!!!!
There is a great example from Render monkey (since allot have been converted from there) called Gold glow or something... WE NEED THIS
Also, Depth of field... the two combined would make stunning visuals...

Yep, depth of field would be great, too. Some nice stuff can be achieved with that one.

how about using the camera.transparence trick in a special way. maybe using a second view also transparent which moves fast to randompositions in a certain radius and set to lower alpha.
i just saw something like that yesterday when playing around. i used then the brightflag and got a very fast but smooth overdraw blending. looks like some kind of gaussianblur. add brightflag.

here are two shots of what i am talking about:


i think there are only slight modifications to be done. and it should also get tested on regular models,but...
however, if we get those shaders to the whole level, it .... stop.., here we go... render to texture(flat but highpoly(better in/output) model set proper to fill the whole screen..), and a pixelshader which performs the gaussian blur, or whatever. if we get this idea done, we can kick da ass*

but maybe this does not work lets have a look... and maybe you just have to use something like the fur shader onto everything

There was an article in GameDevelopers magazine (www.gamasutra.com) a while back on rendering as done in the game Black&White. They used three different scene renderings with RenderToTexture using different sized textures, and then collated those three renderings into one if I remember correctly. This way you get a fuzzy image in the back, a moderately crisp one in the middle and a sharp one close to the camera.
My concern with this technique is that RenderToTexture is unpredictable, depending on graphics cards and used to be SLOOOW on some. With Radeon 9800s and FX5600s there shouldn't be any problems, but it might be a gamble with older ones. If you want to avoid this potential problem, then going with ello's recommendation is probably better: jitter the camera position slightly and render the scene full-screen with varying alpha transparencies. There is an introduction to this in the OpenGL red book.

Rendermonkey has an amazing depth trick...but it might be DX9.. are there dx8.1 depth shaders out there? I cant find one yet... I have a radeon9600 mobile, and its screaming fast,especially with the this, the "mother of all depth and glow" demos...

http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/index.html#System





Here is a great glow example from the same demo...glow,depth of field, and refraction...wow

hmm, what happend there. did someone change my post? i posted two different images. just curious.
here the second again:


yes, drew. those are impressive, and as i saw those at the 64k demos, i think its not dx9, as this wasnt available then..

To get back to topic, I think a combination of a toon shader and the fur shader would do the trick. In most render engines(maya for example) the softfilter as you call it, is called glow and is actually a post effect. What it does, is make every pixel a colored light, which produces a glow or lightfog effect.

Yeah,
some kind of effect would be great in GS!

PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!

I cant do it myself, if ANYONE could please try a shot at a glow shader and/or depth of field, you will be my hero and get a major credit in any game I use it in!!!

PLEASE!