   How is this look achieved
  How is the following star shape light effect achieved when doing HDR ? With my current technique i just blur several passes or the abckbuffer that is over some defined intensity and overlay them, but this looks just basic compared to the image below.Ive also noticed that some games also render a kind of blue haze as the star streaks out, how is this also achieved?   
  Some interesting "streaked bloom" material turns up in a search for "Masaki Kawase".   ;  Do the bloom blur in diagonal directions rather than Gaussian blur (or do both).   ;  It looks to me like they took a [probably scaled down] copy of the HDR buffer, rotated it some angle, applied the usual bloom blur (more horizontally than vertically), rotated it back [,scaled it up] and added it to the image. To get the six-armed bloom effect, do it three times with angles that differ by 60 degrees.   ;  Also, if you only need this effect for specific light sources (like the sun), then it's much easier and cheaper to just use a traditional corona sprite than a bloom filter.   ;  as Hodgman saiz if its just a single light like the sun just handle it as a special case, otherwise look at "Masaki Kawase". (though those sort of methods are gonna be quite expensive)