Does anyone know where I can find a good tutorial or even demonstration for how to preform bloom as a post-processing effect. I have found theory's and things for how it generally works, but I havent really found any that walk you through it. For DirectX 9 by the way. PS. No MSDN please, they don't walk you through things for crap.

Perhaps this would be of some use to you. I found it on the first page of results from Googling 'bloom as a post process effect'. There also appear to be plenty of XNA examples you could take a look at.

Quote:PS. No MSDN please, they don't walk you through things for crap.

MSDN is excellent. If you find it's not useful to you that's probably a sign that you need to work on your programming fundumentals and are likely over-reliant on hacking together example code; this is severely limiting in that you will be unable to achieve any difficult effects unless you can find an existing implementation to work from, which is not always possible.

Don't get me wrong, MSDN has nearly everything you could ever ask for. The thing is though, they just kind of throw a bunch of info at you and expect you to understand it. I've just never learned much from them.

I hope you don't misunderstand bloom to be HDR (they are not related at all). The bloom effect is supposed to reproduce a lens artifact (this is the reason why I think it simply doesn't make much sense in games since you don't look at the game world through a lens).

The Ogre Wiki contains a fairly good article about the implementation of a bloom filter.

The XNA Creator Club contains a XNA bloom sample that you can study. The sample is heavily commented, so if you already know the theory, you should be able to sort everything out (even if you are not using XNA and C#).

this GDNet thread discusses a glsl implementation of a bloom filter.

NVIDIA has a glow effect implementation (and the corresponding PDF whitepaper. This is DX9 so you should have no problem to adapt this to your architecture although it's a bit more complex to understand than the XNA sample. There is also a more complete OpenGL HDR sample.

Anyway, mapping the theory to the practice is not difficult in the case of the bloom filter (or for any other post-processing effect). This gamasutra article might be a good introduction.

Quote:Original post by TheKrust
Don't get me wrong, MSDN has nearly everything you could ever ask for. The thing is though, they just kind of throw a bunch of info at you and expect you to understand it. I've just never learned much from them.

Yes, but the alternative would be to write detailed articles on every subject, and that's not much practical.

The MSDN is intended to be a reference. There are also some technical paper that goes beyond a bare reference, but the main goal is to centralize the knowledge about the APIs - and not much about how to use these APIs to solve a particular problem.

Hopefully, some links I gave you might help you to sort that out [smile]

HTH,