[DX11] Basic HDR question

Hi,
I want to create a shine effect from alpha values greater than one. Can i directly store those alpha values in a common color buffer or something else must be done?

Thanks

Sure. As long as you're rendering to a render target format that has an alpha channel, you can store whatever you want with the alpha channel and then sample it later for post effects. That is how the earliest and simplest bloom/glow effects were implemented.

Nice
And... how are the new ones done? (just an idea)

Nice
And... how are the new ones done? (just an idea)

floating point render targets, to store values >1 directly. there are still steps to be taken after that, but thats the basic idea.

check out the DX SDK samples, grep on HDR and you will find the D3D10 samples that do this. HDRPipeline is especially worthy of study.

Thanks, I'll take a look at those examples ^^.

Additionally, nVidia has a halfway decent demo on render target formats and their effect on final image quality: see here (link to zipped demo).