Does anyone have any good resources for creating special effects, aimed at programmers. I'm not specifically interested in particle effects, but broader things like:
- Fullscreen effects, blur, depth of field, damage
- Explosions, shockwaves
- Weapons, lasers, projectile
- Environment - light "glows" and beams, water, bubbles, dust etc
I'm interested in these things from a technical perspective rather than an artistic one.
EDIT: To clarify, I'm not interested in the low level details like "a method for doing depth peeling on SPUs" or "fast particle rendering with vertex textures", I'm interested in how people have combined various techniques into a recipe to show a special effect for the game.
For example - when rendering a "space" explosion:
- Draw opaque bright sphere at center.
- Draw alpha'd shockwave around a random axis.
- Expand sphere and decrease alpha.
- Expand shockwave and rotate UVs.
- Spawn particles showering randomly from center.
- Wobble camera when shockwave reaches viewer position.