Screenspace effects – Part 1

Today I started working on the screenspace effects…

Screenspace effects are effects that use only the “rendered image”, or more precisely, the 2d representation of the scene (not the whole 3d nature).

A lot of effects fall under this category (and a whole lot more are being worked on all the time)… For my purposes, I’m mainly interested in checking out ambient occlusion, glow and fast decals.

Step one to that is to add to an off-screen (invisible) buffer more information about the scene, namely the depth of each pixel, normals and emissive component, which requires me to tweak the existing render pipeline…

I started with the depth:

Black is closer to the camera, white is further… Due the way the perspective matrix works, the color resolution doesn’t really show properly without a lot of work I don’t want to have at this stage…

Here’s in first person view… Still a bit tricky to see, but the visual aspect isn’t very important, since this will be placed in a buffer for use with the shaders further down the line, not be displayed.

Now listening to “After” by “Ihsahn”