Real-Time 3D Rendering with DirectX® and HLSL: A Practical Guide to Graphics Programming

Chapter 18. Post-Processing

Post-processing refers to a set of graphics techniques that are applied after the scene is rendered. For example, you might want to convert the entire scene into grayscale or make bright areas glow. In this chapter, you author some post-processing effects and integrate them with your C++ rendering framework.

Render Targets

Thus far, all your demo applications have rendered directly to the back buffer, the 2D texture presented to the monitor when rendering is complete. But for post-processing applications, you render the scene to an intermediate texture and then apply the post-processing effect on that texture. The final image is rendered using a full-screen quadrilateral (two triangles that encompass the entire screen). ...