Joey's blur effect... sounds cool... I'm famous *gg*.

The problem with this technique is that you have to blur the sprite's bitmap with gaussian blur or a similar technique. Otherwise you'll see edges and blurry pixels like in the sample above (not that that'd be bad - I find it's great!).

If you invert the bitmap (without blurring it), you can adjust the level's contrast (by changing the alpha value).

If you invert and blur the bitmap, and then subtract it from the view, you get a dark-dream-like effect (as if you were dreaming of a dungeon).

If you blur the bitmap in direction of the camera movement and add it to the view you get a great motion-blur effect.

Many static image filters work with adding/subtracting/mixing (anyhow)manipulated copies to the pictures. I think that there can be taken out a lot for programming shaders.

JOEY.

Are the light beams in the DreamFilter a result of the technique or are those simply a part of the scene.

There is a great executable demo of the Egypt scene posted by Homey above. here is the link egypt.zip there is no source with this and from the looks of things on the site the author is probably not willing to give this information up (but I didn’t ask so who knows) regardless, with the working demo you can see the idea “render to image, blur image, display image” and it runs very very well tested it on my 533mhz Cpu, 320 mb Ram, 64mb NVIDIA Geforce, with no speed loss.

P.S. the demo flickers a bit when you walk around, just ramp up the size, for the effect and it looks really nice, (and still runs well).

anyone thought of using render to texture on a plane(aligned infront of the camera) and then applying the fur shader? this could do great jobs(but maybe a fps-killer??) i dont know;-)

hey i tried with sprites and here are the results:
glow:

w/o glow:
Well its not perfect but it gives the idea of glow

@ello and everyone else trying to use a render_to_view soft effect:

wouldn't there be render to view weaknesses when using render to view for a soft shader?

the view would be rendered onto the sprite, the sprite is transparent and softens it up however it does it, then (on the next frame), the view is rendered onto the sprite, but the view already includes that sprite, so it increases the effect, and this would continue and eventually lead to a fuzzy white view, right?

Julian

not if u use a nontransparent plane model used directly before your eye

Your probably right, (you ARE the FX master) but could you please explain how that works?

Julian

i thought that you use a variable transparent sprite in front of the view. then you render the camera to the bitmap of the sprite while it is invisible. then you blur the picture (or transform it elsehow - described below) and turn it back to it's previous transparent value. by adjusting alpha and the blur radius, you can control strength of the effect.
with a shader (or by the 'bright'-flag) you can either set addive, subtractive or multiply to the sprite and maybe invert it, too. by combining those effects you get great effects.

examples:

• addive + blur => glow
  
• subtractive + invert + blur => negative glow, dreamy, dark effect
  
• addive || subtractive + invert + glow => control over contrast and brighteness
  
• subtractive + glow => ugly effect (looks like a bad painting ;-)
  ...
  

hope you now understood what i meant.

JOEY.

hm... isn't this a recursive explanation?

to do a blur effect you have to render a transparent sprite in front of the camera with a blur effect.