hi how can I find some good lighting effects, I've searched nvidia shader library but some good ones (like bloom) don't compile and I cannot use them, what's the problem? where can I find more effects? thanks a lot

Lighting can be everything and nothing - you really need to constrain your requirements before you can go any further or you'll be digging around for years!

Effects such as bloom and HDRI are often tied in with lighting, but as far as I'm concerned they are not actually lighting. They are more lens effects (bloom being the scattering of light energy within a lens and/or the bleeding of light energy as recorded on physical film) or post-processing to try and get a more realistic form of image.

Lighting is, in simple terms, made from two key parts - the transport of light energy (how it gets from an emitter to a receiver) and the reaction of light energy at the destination (e.g. how a surface reflects light back to the viewer).

The latter is typically covered by "lighting models" and BRDF's - there are loads of these out there. You'll probably have seen references to Blinn-Phong, Ward, Strauss, Cook-Torrance etc...etc...

The former is where you get into the scope of direct and indirect lighting - rasterization versus global illumination (or SH/PRT for a hybrid). In the context of shaders this is largely ignored unless you want to tackle the hugely complex effects.

I'm hoping that at least my section of our D3D10 book on lighting will be freely available soon as it covers both of these aspects [smile]


As for "don't compile" well you've not given us anything useful to work with here!! In my experience the Nvidia and AMD SDK's tend to work out of the box, but if you're just playing the role of a copy-n-paste coder there could be any number of reasons. Chances are they're a whole new thread in their own right...

hth
Jack