Multiple Passes

Render the first light normally and use additive alpha blending to render each subsequent light over the previous ones.

First pass:
ALPHABLENDENABLE = false
Render objects with settings of first light

Each consecutive pass:
ALPHABLENDENABLE = true
SRCBLEND = one
DESTBLEND = one
Render objects with settings of respective light

Using this technique adds the effect of each light on top of the current scene. Of course using multiple light passes is not the fastest thing in the world as it requires all the vertex transforms, texture look ups etc. to be done multiple times.

Ok, that is along the lines of what I want to do.

Let's say pass one drew my cube, with 1 spotlight. It executed a vertex shader and a pixel shader, using a float3 lightDir variable.


So, now I want to make another pass and change my lightDir variable.
And I do what in my application's render method?


Now let's look at the shader code.
Pass 2 is getting its VS_INPUT from where?
It's PS_OUTPUT is going where?

Where am I to blend the output from pass 1 with the output of pass 2?
In a shader? In the application? How do I even get seperate output from the passes to blend and what form of data are they taking?

Where does the output of my first pass go? How do I give it to the second. How am I getting the one thing to blend with the other?




All I've done is a single pass.
I know my input comes from my vertex buffer and index buffer
I know I set my effect variables before making my draw call.
I know my output goes....??? to the screen?

Please describe the above 3 lines for the second pass.




Thanks for the help! I can't find anything on google or the SDK that _really_ describes multiple passes.

your output goes to the frame buffer.
swap out your shaders / variables.
change the blending mode as described above.
Re-Render your scene (your draw primitive calls).

You input is your vertex/index buffers.
You shared variables are whatever you set them to before your draw call.
Your output is the screen (added ontop of your previous pass)


You could change this a bit by setting a texture as the output of all your PixelShaders, and then render that texture to the screen.
But the base process is the same.

Quote:

Original post by VizOne First pass: ALPHABLENDENABLE = false Render objects with settings of first light Each consecutive pass: ALPHABLENDENABLE = true SRCBLEND = one DESTBLEND = one Render objects with settings of respective light

I see no where in the DirectX 10 SDK how to set these states. I follow what you are saying exactly in DX9, but I am using 10. The functions are simply not there anymore.

Nor is inforamtion on alpha blenidng included in the dx10 SDK.
Hell, they omitted everything except the "draw a triangle and spin it".

So umm, how exactly do you set this state in DX10?

Quote:

Original post by brekehan I see no where in the DirectX 10 SDK how to set these states. I follow what you are saying exactly in DX9, but I am using 10. The functions are simply not there anymore.

Ah, you're using DX10, didn't realize that. Blending is described here:
Configuring Blending Functionality (Direct3D 10)

The good news is that the whole thing is probably easier than you think!

Here's some pseudo code



The point is: your shaders don't need to have a clue about whether they are rendering the first, second or sixteenth light. For each light you render the geometry completely the same way, except that you change the blend state to additional blending for any but the first light.

The results are accumulated into the render target.

Ah, that looks strraight foward enough. I shall begin the coding. Thanks so much. I will post here is it doesn't work in the morning :)