Over the course of the years that passed in the industry, games have always pushed the envelope of what was possible in terms of presentation to impress players and one-up what had been done before. Color depth increased, sprites were replaced by polygons, which were later colored using texture images. With the rise of programmable hardware, elaborate lighting models were implemented and tricks like normal, parallax, and bump mapping surfaced to make games look even more realistic and awesome.

With the rise of seventh generation video game consoles like Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the graphics of video games reached a point where lit pixels and bumpy surfaces were just not enough anymore. So today, to make games look even more exciting, post-processing effects are added to create cinematic effects like depth of field or color correction.

Besides that, using render-to-texture functionality to generate intermediate textures that are processed, filtered, and then composited back into the final image, gives graphics developers very interesting capabilities when creating the final image. Just like in a painting, the on-screen image consists of various layers that ultimately form the final result.

In this chapter you will learn how to use Panda3D to render to off-screen buffers and how to create post-processing effects to generate stunning visuals for your games.