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Depth of field
Tuesday, November 19, 2002 | Permalink

Executable
Source code
DepthOfField.zip (381 KB)

Required:
GL_ARB_fragment_program
GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap
GL_EXT_texture3D
GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp
WGL_ARB_render_texture/GLX_ATI_render_texture
This demo shows a way to do depth of field with a fragment program. The technique is simple, unfortunately the result follows accordingly. What I've done is render the scene into a texture. At the same time I put the radial distance into the alpha channel. I let the hardware generate the mipmaps with GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap. Then in the fragment shader I can on a per-fragment basis select the LOD. I pass a focus distance to the fragment program and use LOD = const * abs(dist - focusDist).
What I meant with the "result follows accordingly" comment is that it didn't quite look as good as I had hoped. The mipmap lod with a linear filter gives quite a blocky apperance of out-of-focus parts of the scene. For limited blur it works fine though.
Oh, and don't mind the simple texturing and lack of lighting in this demo. Didn't bother to do something serious on that side of things.

You can move the focus spot with you + and - keys.

This demo will run on Radeon 9700 only at this time.