When rendering point sprites with DirectX, many people deals with the issue of point sprite scaling. There are many options regarding this, but in the 99% of the cases, people just wants one of the following two things:
1.- Point Sprites with a constant screen-space size
This sprites are rendered at the 3D position (projected to the viewport of course), but with a constant size, in pixels. So, if you move the camera towards the point sprite, it feels like if it shrinks, and if you move the camera away from the sprite, it will look like if “growing”.
This effect is sometimes desirable, specially if you are using point sprites to simulate 2D effects, post-processing or camera effects like Lens Flares (on your left).
To setup this kind of Point Sprite rendering in DirectX, you just need to disable PointSprite scaling. This way, you will be able to specify point sizes both with a default value or in each point vertex information. These are the render states you need to modify:
Disable point scaling: D3DRS_POINTSCALEENABLE = false
Set default point size (remember, in pixels): D3DRS_POINTSIZE = XX
2.- Point Sprites with a real 3D size
By contrary to what’s shown in the previous chapter, sometimes you need point sprites to behave like real 3D objects, i.e. when using them to simulate a particle system, or that kind of stuff.
In this case, you don’t want sprites to remain at the same size if you move away from them, as real 3D objects get smaller as we get farther from them and vice versa. It is obvious that we need to change the size of sprites (remember, it’s a 2D size, in pixels), accordingly to our 3D movements, to give the illusion of 3D behavior.
DirectX is already prepared for that, with a built-in system to handle point sprite scaling. You just need to activate it setting the render state D3DRS_POINTSCALEENABLE to true, and setting up some other parameters. If you take a look at the docs, you will find the following:
Point Size ComputationsPoint size is determined by D3DRS_POINTSCALEENABLE. If this value is set to FALSE, the application-specified point size is used as the screen-space (post-transformed) size. Vertices that are passed to Direct3D in screen space do not have point sizes computed; the specified point size is interpreted as screen-space size. If D3DRS_POINTSCALEENABLE is TRUE, Direct3D computes the screen-space point size according to the following formula. The application-specified point size is expressed in camera space units. S s = Vh * S i * sqrt(1/(A + B * D e + C *( D e2 ))) In this formula, the input point size, S i, is either per-vertex or the value of the D3DRS_POINTSIZE render state. The point scale factors, D3DRS_POINTSCALE_A, D3DRS_POINTSCALE_B, and D3DRS_POINTSCALE_C, are represented by the points A, B, and C. The height of the viewport, V h, is the D3DVIEWPORT9 structure's Height member representing the viewport. D e, the distance from the eye to the position (the eye at the origin), is computed by taking the eye space position of the point (Xe, Ye, Ze) and performing the following operation. D e = sqrt (Xe2 + Y e2 + Z e2) The maximum point size, Pmax, is determined by taking the smaller of either the D3DCAPS9 structure's MaxPointSize member or the D3DRS_POINTSIZE_MAX render state. The minimum point size, Pmin, is determined by querying the value of D3DRS_POINTSIZE_MIN. Thus the final screen-space point size, S, is determined in the following manner.
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Well, that´s all. Clear ugh? Just kidding…
Setting the A,B,C scaling parameters for a correct, 3D, point scaling
In order to achieve the behavior you want, you just have to set the following configuration:
D3DRS_POINTSCALE_A = 0.0f
D3DRS_POINTSCALE_B = 0.0f
D3DRS_POINTSCALE_C = 1.0f
D3DRS_POINTSIZE_MIN = 0.0f
D3DRS_POINTSIZE_MAX = 9999.0f
Et voilá ! 3D point sprites…