DirectX Lens Flares and Coronas

[Warmaster199]

First off, what is a corona or lens flare. Well, you see them in the real world(sometimes), on TV(Always outdoor scenes), on most good video games, etc... Ever notice the almost transparent rings that appear on the screen when your charactor looks at the sun? Those little rings are coronas. Look at a picture of this awesome effect by clicking on the link below. NOTE: Right click the link and save the image first as Geocities is very screwy. Then open the file you saved.

http://www.geocities.com/warmaster2000us/sweetness.bmp

Those Coronas in that picture were from a C++ sample in the DirectX 7 SDK. Ask me if you need the individual corona pictures.

I have the bitmaps that need to be blt'ed, but I don't have the algorythms for making them work. How can I make coronas appear in my 3D world? Notice that the coronas are in line with the sun. All of them seem to be on a common vertex of some sort. When the user moves, the coronas move along with the "vertex" whick moves with the user as well.

I greatly appreciate ANY help or code.
Thanks :)

[Jotaf98]

Sure there is a way, you'll just have to find a relation between the coordinates of all the lens, then you move one and all the other lens will move too. Hope you know how to do that, it's kinda complex and I don't know how to do it in 3D :)

[Jotaf98]

Also, I tried but I can't find the image in ANY way. Try posing it in GIF/JPG format instead please ;)

the lense flare, they're on a vector, crossing the level in the middle.

u'll find probably a lot of information about it by going to http://www.gamedev.net/gamedev.asp and then going to their message board and doing a search for lensflare and u'll find a lot of discussions on them..

also, which sample is the screenshot exactly from.. is it directX 7 or 8??

[Warmaster199]

The sample is from DirectX 7 SDK's C++ samples. I got some pictures of the flare bitmap by itself(Just each flare). black backround, white/grey foreground, blah, blah, blah... Got to my site, http://www.geocities.com/warmaster2000us and in the text, there is a link for coronas. The bitmaps will be zipped up on that page.

[Jotaf98]

Hey, good luck on your 3D engine! I have an idea: you could give the user the option to, if his computer is fast enough, blend each frame so it looks better. Because those edges don't look good in ANY game and I haven't seen any game without them ;)

And as to the lens, I have discovered how to do them! Here's a little diagram so you understand it:

http://freepages.ugo.com/firehawk/files/coronas.gif

Hope that helps!