Rendering Trailing Effect Using Opengl

Question

I have to develop a game for my Graphics Course. I came across this video on the net.

http://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordcs248

I want to know how are the hazy/smoky effects which trails along with the cube is rendered using OpenGL and c++?

Answer 1

What you're seeing is post-process effects. Basically they first render the scene into a framebuffer object (FBO), then take that as a source texture and perform various operations on it. Among other things they talk about bloom effects etc, which are done in the same manner.

Answer 2

The smoky trailing effects are likely implemented with a particle system.