HLSL - Part 2.

More shader effects I have created.

2D Fire Effect

This effect uses a 2D screen aligned quad and applies multiple passes to transform the original texture data into a fire effect. There are many examples of fire shaders available, on the internet; however I decided to create my own. The effect was refined and improved to reduce the number of ALUs needed and thus reaching good performance speeds.

The full effect consists of four passes. The first does most of the work, making the texture look like a fire by applying colours, and distorting the texture co-ordinates. The second, third and fourth down-sample the apply a Gaussian blur to the output of the first pass. Finally the image is upsampled and combined with the first pass' output to provide the final effect.

Render Target Textures

This effect uses render targets to demonstrate techniques seen in games like Super Paper Mario, where 3D visuals are projected onto flat 2D surfaces in a 3D environment. In this effect, a 3D elephant model is drawn to a renderable texture which is mapped onto a 3D cube and a 2D quad plane in 3D space with alpha transparency.

The effect is broken down into three passes. The first renders the rotating elephant to a texture, from the point of view of a second camera. The areas of the texture not populated by elephant pixels are set to be completely transparent.

The second pass renders the outer 3D cube and maps the elephant texture onto the faces of the cube. The transparent areas of the texture are replaced with a golf course image, to provide a background.

The last pass renders a small quad in the centre of the world. The quad is alpha blended so that the only pixels drawn are those depicting the elephant. When the user looks straight at the quad, the elephant appears 3D however it is really just a projection.