ABSTRACT
As screen effects and deferred shading become standard fare in game engines, a good compositing tool becomes a key part of the rendering pipeline. In the game Spore, we used a scriptable filter chain system to process frames at runtime. A filter chain is essentially just a series of parameterized image processing shaders applied in order. Every frame in our game is processed and composited using this system. In addition to the standard art-directed look of Spore, we created a set of specialized filters to generate dramatically different visual styles for the game. Figure 1.1 shows a Spore rendered as an oil painting. These were so compelling that we shipped them with Spore as player-enabled cheats. In this article we would like to breakdown some of the visual styles we generated and share details about the design and implementation of our Filter Chain system.
