Sunlight

While working on the visual style for my weird live performance game Cello Fortress I came up with a new technique for depth of field blur: area based depth of field blur. As far as I know this is not an existing technique so today I would like to explain how it works. The visual style for Cello Fortress is far from finished at the moment, but I decided early on that I wanted strong depth of field blur to play a major role. I had already implemented depth of field blur for Proun (which by the way is coming to 3DS, iOS and Android soon!) and I copied that to Cello Fortress. Proun does not have blur on the foreground, so I added that and tried it in-game. The result turned out to not work at all, as you can see in this image (be sure to click the image for a larger version, since this is difficult to see in these small blog-sized images): click for larger image The problem is that with standard depth of field blur, only one specific distance to the camera is sharp. In Cello Fortress th...

Bokeh is an effect that pops up in a lot of new games. It is one of those effects that makes a game instantly feel a lot more "next-gen". It is also an effect that usually eats up a lot of performance. For Cello Fortress I came up with a simplified version of bokeh that looks really high quality, is very fast to render and even very easy to implement. My implementation also has some severe limitations, but I think it can work really well for many games. Bokeh is a part of focal blur, which is also known as depth of field blur or DoF. DoF is the effect that only objects at a certain distance are sharp, while everything closer and further away is blurred. This is an effect that every lens has, and the larger the lens is, the stronger the blur is. Focal blur has been done in many games for quite a while now, but with the normal DoF rendering techniques the bokeh effect is usually lost. Bokeh means that extremely bright spots grow with the blur and appear as clearly recognisable...

I posted about depth of field blur last week and discussing it in the comments got my mind back on the "Bokeh" effect. Bokeh is an advanced form of depth of field blur that is currently used in lots of tech demos to show what the next console generation will be capable of. So that got me curious again as to how Bokeh is made. I have been experimenting with it in Proun and have some nice images to share! Bokeh is the effect that when there is strong depth of field blur, bright lights in the background become bright spots, often visible as circles or hexagons. This is a real lens effect that can also be seen in photographs, and it looks pretty cool, since it adds some definition to an otherwise completely blurry depth of field blur effect. A nice example of rendering Bokeh on the videocard can be found in Epic's Samaritan demo. Although the style and look of this demo don't really appeal to me, Epic shows lots of really cool effects here that they think will be possi...

Depth of field blur is an effect that is used in many modern games as a cool graphics effect. A nice example of this is of course my own game Proun (for which I discussed the depth of field blur in one of my very first blog posts ). However, while making Awesomenauts , I learned that it is much more than just a graphics effect. In fact, it even improved the framerate a lot ! Initially we didn't have depth of field blur in Awesomenauts, but then the first trailers of the beautiful Rayman Origins were released, and they have some levels where they add a ton of depth of field blur to the backgrounds, which looks great. So we wanted something similar, especially as these kinds of effects help make a 2D game look more like "triple A 2D" (for as much as that is an existing term). Unlike in 3D, doing depth of field blur in 2D is actually incredibly simple. You can just render the furthest objects to a separate texture, blur that, and then render the closer objects on top of th...