HLSL - Part 3.

Bubble

The Bubble effect makes use of several different techniques, bringing them together into one. It features cube mapping, environment mapping, reflection, refraction, colour blending and vertex manipulation.

The effect consists of 2 core passes, one for rendering the environment map and one for rendering the bubble.

The second pass renders the bubble. During this pass, several colours are attained from several sources, and are blended together to produce the final output colour. These sources are a colour from a rainbow texture, the view through the bubble, the reflection off the front of the bubble and the reflection off the inside of the bubble.

The rainbow colour is chosen based on a time variable, added to the distance from the camera to the bubble, and added to the dot product of the view direction and light direction. The combination of these values produces a change in colour when zooming in and out, when rotating around the bubble, and slowly over time.

The next colour to be added is the pass-through colour. This is the colour from the cube map on the other side of the bubble. Refraction would affect the light passing through the bubble, magnifying the view slightly.

The third colour to add is the reflection from the inside of the bubble. The colour is multiplied by the inverse of the rainbow’s alpha value to only draw it where the rainbow colours are not (this reflection should be a weak value, in this case it is visualised as being overpowered by the rainbow colour value).

The final colour value to add to the output colour is the reflection colour from the front of the bubble. The view direction is reflected in the bubble’s normal and the colour is extracted from the cube map. This final colour is multiplied by the sum of the opacity value used for the inverse reflection and an edge value so that the reflection is more intense towards the edge of the bubble. Finally it is added to the output colour which is finally rendered to the screen.

Over Exposure

In real life terms, exposure relates to the length of time a camera lens is open. The longer the lens is opened, the more light is put onto the image. The extra light saturates the image, and eventually the image is overpowered with light and is turned completely white. This shader effect attempts to simulate the feel of over-exposure.