Introduction

Lighting and postprocessing are two of the most important fields in 3D rendering. A scene that is properly lit with the right postprocessing effects can produce beautiful results, but not every element you may want to render can be represented by a mesh you can load from file. One common scenario where a mesh loaded from a file cannot be used is when the mesh has to be dynamically generated at runtime based on some unpredictable event, like a mesh that represents damage to the scene. Another good example is when rendering an element which is too complex to be represented by triangles, like smoke and fire.

In this chapter, we will focus on techniques which implement those various scene elements, which we can't represent with a loaded mesh. The recipes presented in this chapter can be split into three main categories:

• Dynamic mesh generation: It is used in cases where the mesh shape can't be predicted beforehand, but once the mesh is prepared it no longer changes

• Depth-based rendering...