not quite sure how he made it, but such glowing effekts could be achieved by using OPENGL blend modes :
http://www.flight404.com/blog/?p=71
http://www.flight404.com/blog/?p=72

those are nothing more than a sprite texture of some shape with additive blending moving along a path.

since the sprite geometry overlaps the color gets added to the framebuffer and produces such results



for additive blend

glBlendFunc( GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE );  //this will be based on the the alpha value of the incoming color (the color you pass to GL )

or

glBlendFunc( GL_ONE, GL_ONE );  // this will take use color

also make sure you disable depth writing. luckily, additive blending doesn't need sorting.

glDepthWrite( false );

you will need to use offscreen rendering.

render scene to an offscreen buffer of about 1/4th of the the screen size and apply a blur to it. you could use downsampling/upsampling to achieve a blur for free using bilinear filtering.

then just render your scene normally and render a fullscreen rectangle with the blurred image on top with additive blend turned on.

for processing i believe glgraphics library would do it. i haven't tried the lib but i know lots of people use it

i would go with a different approach.

render your scene into a texture, blur it and then bind it to a full-screen aligned quad.
that should make it simple for you and much more appealing.

as on how to do it. look into glgraphics.. it seems like the perfect lib for you to use.
i think that library includes some blur/gaussian and gloom examples. check it out.

have fun.

here's an example on how to do it.
It uses my own framework, so you will depend on it. Dont worry it's a good thing
www.pixelnerve.com/downloads/NeonEffect.zip

inside the zip there is a folder called vitamin. copy it to processing libraries and just run the example.


For more on Vitamin: http://www.pixelnerve.com/processing/libraries/vitamin/


on technical side: it does exactly what i told you to do.
render scene to texture, apply a gaussian filter to that texture and render it on a fullscreen quad as a post process effect.
the blur is done is 2 passes and a third to upscale that blurred texture.

have fun.

Ah yes. You need Cg toolkit installed.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cg_toolkit.html


EDIT: btw i've updated the zip file.

You're wrong =)

Vitamin works directly with JOGL. All it needs is a GL object, which is given by Processing on the VGL object creation. It also works without Processing. Look into VApplication.

to access the GL object use gl() getter. that's it.

void draw()
{
  // render with processing here

 vgl.begin();
 // render with Vitamin here
 GL gl = vgl.gl(); // get reference if you wish to use it directly
 
 vgl.end();

 // you could render with processing here aswell
}

There are alot of easy to use methods in Vitamin (alot like the processing syntax). Look into the Javadocs it shouldn't be hard to get you started.

Have fun.