hi friends I've made up a scene including a terrain and a shooting target on top of the mountains, now I want my shooting target to stand out from the scene, I want it to be clearly visible at the far distance, currently I render it with a small shader which just changes the diffuse color, although not so bad but I want something more interesting such as a glow effect, or a target shining at its place, emitting light, or any other technique which could help in this way, what's the best way? any sample code? any shader available for this purpose... thanks in advance www.galaxyroad.com

The classic, and dead simple method, is to extrude the mesh along the normals by a small amount and then re-render it but with a bright colour and alpha-blending. It can look a bit cheap/tacky by comparison to the current crop of effects [smile]

Given that you mention shaders, you have a lot more options. I suggest you do some reading into the HDRI rendering (lots of information on this) as they tend to use a screen-space blur computed in the pixel shader and then composited with the original scene.

Another example, you could simply render your object again, but to a texture 1/4 the size and then render that (using a TLQuad) over the top of your original scene but with a slight multiplication to make it brighter.

hth
Jack

Quote:Original post by Illco
This may be an interesting read as well.

Aye, I agree - that is a great article. IIRC, it was in GPU Gems, too (kinda weird that it was available online for free, but it was still printed).

Since JJ recommended blurring, here is a decent article on fast hardware blurring. The PostProcessing demo in the DXSDK provides an implementation of this, too (along with many other effects).

Right on. The edge glow demo (see post processing) in the DirectX SDK would do wonders for your game.