Distance field based decal rendering
Rim van Wersch shares an XNA Framework implementation of the Valve paper Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects, presenting “[a] simple and efficient method […] which allows improved rendering of glyphs composed of curved and linear elements. A distance field is generated from a high resolution image, and then stored into a channel of a lower-resolution texture.”
Post Processing Trick from MJP
Matt Pettineo took a crack at a trick used in Killzone 2 for Lens Flare, and decided to share his new shader with the world.
Two Samples For The Price Of One at MJP’s XNA Danger Zone
Over at MJP’s XNA Danger Zone Matt J. Pettineo writes:
Today I have two XNA samples fresh out of the oven: a Motion Blur Sample, and Depth Of Field Sample. I figure all of the kids these days wanna add fancy post-processing tricks to their games, right?
Instanced Deferred Render
Nemo Krad (of RandomChaos) continues to tease us with yet another video of his Deferred Render Instancing sample.
Let's hope he releases the code soon, because what he's doing there definitely looks sweet, and there can never be too many samples about deferred rendering, or instancing!
See all his posts about this so far, here.
Scrolls from the Past: Crash Course in HLSL
Greetings again, good sirs and ladies.
This week, we will have a different kind of scoll to look at. Instead of looking into the archives for scrolls written by other people in times past, I will show you something that I accidentally found in my own archives today.
This was written many moons ago, as a sample for a book that was to be written for a great library together with some other wizards of XNA land. Even though the library keepers liked my writing, their plans for that book changed, and it never got written.
Alas, I decided to not let those scrolls be forgotten, so I blew the dust off of them, made some corrections, and decided to bring them to your attention. In them, I talked about a detailed introduction into the magic of HLSL, and the basic elements needed to understand and use this wonderful kind of magic. You can find it here.
Have a nice reading, and I wholeheartedly hope it helps at least some of my usual readers.
Article: Crash Course in HLSL
by Catalin Zima
What does HLSL stand for? Why was it created? How does an HLSL effect file look like? What can you do with HLSL? What do float4x4, TEXCOORD0 or compile ps_3_0 mean? The answer to the first question is simple: HLSL means High Level Shader Language. This answer by itself might raise a few questions. The answers for these and a few other questions will be found in this article.
Article : Realistic Soft Edged Water In XNA
by X-Tatic
Still water bodies are a powerful distinguishing factor for identifying an outdoor scene. The nature of this water, such as a lake, makes it challenging to render efficiently while still maintaining a believable sense of realism. There are several factors that need to be considered when rendering such a water body and in this article I will cover each one while presenting the technical details.
Article: Fur Rendering
by Catalin Zima
In this article, you will see how you can render fur in your XNA games. At first, we will look over the technique use to render the fur, then we will look at several improvements that can be done, and in the end, we will apply it to a model.
Article: Simply Rendertargets
by Conkerjo
This article describes how to use RenderTargets to draw a portion of the screen or an image using SpriteBatch.