depth of field, of a sort

This was initially inspired by @inconvergent 's gorgeous DoF renders. Wanted to see if you could get a similar effect in realtime by constructing lines out of tons of GPU particles, and then just displacing the particle positions instead of actually sampling the CoC

Answer: No, because the number of particles you need for it to work is wildly impractical. Like, 16 million didn't even come close

but if you make the particles big they look like bokeh, so I just started exploring in that direction instead

Fun fact: Vertex shader for 16 million billboarded quads runs just fine, but as soon as they're bigger than like 1px you instantly get completely wrecked by overdraw

That video used 1m quads, about as big as I could make them while still hitting ""interactive framerates""

Going for a softer effect, here's 4 million quads, with settings that allow them to grow much larger

took 20 minutes to render lol