Text in texture with effect
I am currently making a component for a larger graphical system. It is rendering text into a texture for display on some 3d object.
I am currently using drawText, which works just fine, though there is perhaps a better/faster way of doing it?
My question is about effects. If I want the text to have a blurry outline, i imagined doing it like this
render the text to a texture T1, being the render target
select T1 as input texture and change to a new texture T2 being the render target
Select a pixelshader and then render a transformed and projected quad, with same size as T1 and T2, using T1. The pixelshader shall then output (to T2) the mean of a 9x9 area surrounding the pixel in T1.
This gives a blurred text.
Next I render the text again into T2, to make the clear text surrounded by the blurr, and this is the result.
However... can this be done in an easier way? Perhaps with an effect which has more than one step? I am unsure about weather I can perhaps even sample texturevalues from the same texture that I am currently writing into. Can I in an effect switch between textures being used as rendertarget and colorsampler texture?
