Initial Light Bloom and Smoke

 

Video from project test

Light Bloom
By adapting and simplifying the code of the Bloom Sample from Microsoft XNA resources,
http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/sample/bloom

I have been able to achieve a desired Light Bloom Effect.  I am using a small, 3 pixel kernel size to preserve the light effect, from farther distances.  This still produces an adequate result and will save time versus using the original 15 kernel size.  The filtering process uses seperable Gausian filtering via GPU.  The result is combined with the original scene.

As of now light emitters are defined by transparency in the texture.  Models are rendered first normally, then a second pass renders only the light spots, which is then passed through the filtering process.

Smoke
Using the point sprite system in Riemer's XNA tutorial,
http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/Csharp/Series2/Point_sprites.php
I have been able to implement a simple exhaust system.  I will be adapting his code to suit my needs, and use a custom vertex system that will allow the smoke particles to increase in size, and to become more transparent.