Ah yes render to texture I forgot to mention that one in ..just to name a few.. Anyways thanks for clearing that up When A7 is released i'll consider again for upgrading to professional.


All the best,

Dusty

PheMox: If you can do it then please make a template post processing collection for the pro edition. Maybe you can sell this later on. I would be interested.

I will consider providing a post-processing collection but that will definately take some time, by the way I'm already in the process of making a littly tutorial about how to make post processing effects with A6, but it's not finished either yet. For now though, I can recommend trying Oliver2s refraction shader and to use that approach on a view instead, that's basically the best way to do full screen post-processing effects ...

Cheers

You normally don't use the depth buffer in a shader. For depth information the scene depth is usually rendered into a floating point texture. This is possible with the beta version.

All effects mentioned here can be done by users. However I am aware of the usual problems with user shaders posted on the shader forum. When developing a shader for your own purposes, it's a lot of additional work to provide an easy template for making the shader available to beginners. Therefore all the newbie problems with shaders. When you're following the beta features, you see that we're developing a shader template collection.

Any user contributions to the shader collection are very welcome. If you need any certain engine feature for a shader effect, please post a request to this section. Shader feature requests will be treated with high priority, and shader devlopers can join the beta team.

You will probably find a lot about depth buffers on websites dealing with shadow mapping etc. as rendering the scene depth from the lights perspective to a (preferably) floating point surface / texture is one of the processes needed to achieve this.
As you can see from the screenshot below, the scene is rendered to a surface using a simple shader, and visible in the upper left corner and then mapped onto the scene later.
Where xLightWorldViewProjection is the product of the lights view and projection matrices and xMaxDepth is used to normalize the value so that it’s smaller than 1.0 and can be used as a colour.
To get the xLightWorldViewProjection you could do something like:
D3DXMATRIX matLightWorld;
D3DXMatrixIdentity( &matLightWorld );

D3DXMATRIX matLightView;
D3DXMatrixIdentity( &matLightView );
D3DXMatrixLookAtLH(&matLightView, &D3DXVECTOR3(-2500.0f, 400.0f, -200.0f), &D3DXVECTOR3(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f), &D3DXVECTOR3(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f));

D3DXMATRIX matLightProjection;
D3DXMatrixIdentity( &matLightProjection );
D3DXMatrixPerspectiveFovLH( &matLightProjection, D3DXToRadian(45.0f), (FLOAT)SCREEN_WIDTH / (FLOAT)SCREEN_HEIGHT, 1.0f, 4000.0f );
D3DXMATRIX matLightWorldViewProjection = matLightWorld * matLightView * matLightProjection;

struct SMapVertexToPixel
{
float4 Position : POSITION;
float3 Position2D : TEXCOORD0;
};
struct SMapPixelToFrame
{
float4 Color : COLOR0;
};
SMapVertexToPixel ShadowMapVertexShader( float4 inPos : POSITION)
{
SMapVertexToPixel Output = (SMapVertexToPixel)0;
Output.Position = mul(inPos, xLightWorldViewProjection);
Output.Position2D = Output.Position;

return Output;
}

SMapPixelToFrame ShadowMapPixelShader(SMapVertexToPixel PSIn)
{
SMapPixelToFrame Output = (SMapPixelToFrame)0;
Output.Color = PSIn.Position2D.z/xMaxDepth;
return Output;
}

Thanks,
that means that there is no other way than assigning this simple shader to each model and to render the sky black, if it is rendered in the "depth_view" -.-

It is no problem to change the entitys materials depending on the view but I´ve got some problems in doing the same with levelgeometrie...

I´ll post this in the scripting forum.