Building a postFX

Torque 3D's postFX system allows us to create full screen shader effects using the PostEffect class. Examples of postFX included with Torque 3D are object glows, screen gamma correction, and camera depth of field effects. Building our own postFX is very similar to working with the CustomMaterial class, which also allows us to write custom shaders, but for 3D objects instead (please see the Building a custom material recipe).

While a discussion on writing HLSL code to produce shaders is beyond the scope of this book, this recipe demonstrates how to hook up custom vertex and pixel shaders into Torque 3D's postFX pipeline, and provides TorqueScript parameters to change the postFX rendering in real time.

Getting ready

We will be making TorqueScript changes in a project based on the Torque 3D Full template, and try them out using the Empty Terrain level. If you haven't already, use the Torque Project Manager (Project Manager.exe) to create a new project from the Full template....