Project, source and executable for Windows XP using glut32. Project builds with MSVC version 7; might be possible to port to other versions and other platforms, but I haven't done so. Please excuse the fragmented code; this is slashed out of a separate test projects of mine.

Download zip file (about a megabyte)

Your OpenGL implementation needs to support GENERATE_MIPMAP and TEXTURE_LOD_BIAS to work correctly. Else you'll probably get asserts, although you can probably take these out and get "something" on the screen.

This code uses only vanilla OpenGL; it does not require any fancy vendor-specific extensions, nor the ARB_fragment_shader extension. That's basically the positive: the negative is that it looks awful (hey, it's using vanilla OGL and is easy to understand; you can't have it all in the same project).

Using GENERATE_MIPMAP, TEXTURE_LOD_BIAS and CopyTexSubImage to render depth of field in two passes. First, render the scene smaller to generate the "blurred" image, and put a function of distance-from-camera in the alpha channel. Second, apply this texture in DECAL mode using projective texturing that maps the screen projection onto geometry; this is done with TexGen in EYE_LINEAR space.

This technique is very dependent on the quality of your MIP map generation, and the size of the blur texture you choose to use.

To run the sample: in a command-line window, change to the directory where the .exe lives, and start it with dof.exe. Move left/right and front/back with arrow keys. Toggle blurring with the "b" key. Quit with Escape. WARNING: You'll need to be in 32-bit mode for this to work correctly.

If you start with "-w" it will run in windowed mode.

There are alternate ways of doing depth blur. For example, you can treat the entire screen as a texture, either using multiple render targets, or using rectangular textures. You can read the depth buffer and invert to figure out depth position, and do a sampling based on that (ATI has a nice ps2.0-based demo doing this for the Radeon 9700).

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