I am looking to create a glsl shader program that will give me a variable width outline around an arbitrary 2d texture as shown in the picture. Is this a reasonable job for the GPU? I've looked at edge-detection approaches but those would only reasonably provide a few pixels border. I want arbitrary width. Is this doable?
One approach would be to render the object to a texture with a bit larger scale and color it all the way your outline color should be.
Then you render it to another texture as it should be displayed.
In a third render pass you could then combine the 2 textures by choosing the outline texture, when the color-texture is empty and else the color texture.
This could be an expensive process, but it obviously depends on the scope of your project if that impacts performance too much.
I know that normal mapping describes the process of adding detail to meshes without increasing the polygon count, and that this is achieved by using specific normal textures for manipulating the way light is applied to the object. Okay.
But what is bump mapping then? Is it just another term for normal mapping?
How do the visual results compare? Can both techniques be combined?
Bump Mapping describes a general technique for simulating bumps and wrinkles on the surface of an object. This is normally accomplished by manipulating surface normals when doing lighting calculations.
Normal Mapping is a variation of Bump Mapping in which the surface normals are provided via a texture, with normals embedded into the RGB channels of the image.
Other techniques, such as Parallax Mapping, are also Bump Mapping techniques because they distort the surface normals.
To answer the second part of the question, they could fairly easily be combined. The base surface normals could be determined from a normal mapping and then modified via another bump mapping technique.
Bump mapping was originally suggested by Jim Blinn back in 1978. His system basically works by perturbing the normal on a surface by using the height of that texel and the height of the surrounding texels.
This is quite similar to DUDV bumpmapping (You may recall the original environment mapped bump mapping as introduced in DX6 which was DUDV). This works by pre-calculating the derivatives from above so that you can miss out the first stage of the calculation (as it does not change each frame).
Normal mapping is a very similar technique that works by, simply, replacing the normal at each texel position. Conceptually its much simpler.
There is another technique that produces "similar" results. It is called emboss bump mapping. This method works by using multipass rendering. Basically you end up subtracting a gray scale heightmap from the last pass but offsetting it a small amount based on the light direction.
There are other ways of emulating surface topology as well.
Elevation mapping uses the height map as an alpha texture and then renders multiple slices through that texture with a different alpha value to simulate the change in height. If not performed correctly, however, the slices can be very visible.
Displacement mapping works by generating a 3D mesh that uses the texture as its basis. This, obviously, massively increase your vertex count.
Steep parallax, relief mapping, etc are the newest techniques. They work by casting a ray through the heightmap until it intersects. This has the big advantage that if a lump should block out the texture behing it now does as the ray doesn't hit the heightmap behind where it initially hits so always displays the "closest" texel.
is it possible to create a GLSL shader to get any object to be surrounded by a glowing effect?
Let's say i have a 3d cube and if it's selected the cube should be surrounded by a blue glowing effect. Any hints?
Well there are several ways of doing this. If each object is also represented in a winged edge format then it is trivial to calculate the silhouette and then extrude it to generate a glow. This however is, very much, a CPU method.
For a GPU method you could try rendering to an offscreen buffer with the stencil set to increment. If you then perform a blur on the image (though only writing to pixels where the stencil is non zero) you will get a blur around the edge of the image which can then be drawn into the main scene with alpha blending. This is more a blur than a glow but it would be relatively easy to re-jig the brightness so that it renders a glow.
There are plenty of other methods too ... here are a couple of links for you to look through:
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch21.html
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/directx/stencilbufferglowspart1.aspx?display=Mobile
Have a hunt round on google because there is lots of information :)
I have a program in which I need to apply a 2-dimensional texture (simple image) to a surface generated using the marching-cubes algorithm. I have access to the geometry and can add texture coordinates with relative ease, but the best way to generate the coordinates is eluding me.
Each point in the volume represents a single unit of data, and each unit of data may have different properties. To simplify things, I'm looking at sorting them into "types" and assigning each type a texture (or portion of a single large texture atlas).
My problem is I have no idea how to generate the appropriate coordinates. I can store the location of the type's texture in the type class and use that, but then seams will be horribly stretched (if two neighboring points use different parts of the atlas). If possible, I'd like to blend the textures on seams, but I'm not sure the best manner to do that. Blending is optional, but I need to texture the vertices in some fashion. It's possible, but undesirable, to split the geometry into parts for each type, or to duplicate vertices for texturing purposes.
I'd like to avoid using shaders if possible, but if necessary I can use a vertex and/or fragment shader to do the texture blending. If I do use shaders, what would be the most efficient way of telling it was texture or portion to sample? It seems like passing the type through a parameter would be the simplest way, but possible slow.
My volumes are relatively small, 8-16 points in each dimension (I'm keeping them smaller to speed up generation, but there are many on-screen at a given time). I briefly considered making the isosurface twice the resolution of the volume, so each point has more vertices (8, in theory), which may simplify texturing. It doesn't seem like that would make blending any easier, though.
To build the surfaces, I'm using the Visualization Library for OpenGL and its marching cubes and volume system. I have the geometry generated fine, just need to figure out how to texture it.
Is there a way to do this efficiently, and if so what? If not, does anyone have an idea of a better way to handle texturing a volume?
Edit: Just to note, the texture isn't simply a gradient of colors. It's actually a texture, usually with patterns. Hence the difficulty in mapping it, a gradient would've been trivial.
Edit 2: To help clarify the problem, I'm going to add some examples. They may just confuse things, so consider everything above definite fact and these just as help if they can.
My geometry is in cubes, always (loaded, generated and saved in cubes). If shape influences possible solutions, that's it.
I need to apply textures, consisting of patterns and/or colors (unique ones depending on the point's "type") to the geometry, in a technique similar to the splatting done for terrain (this isn't terrain, however, so I don't know if the same techniques could be used).
Shaders are a quick and easy solution, although I'd like to avoid them if possible, as I mentioned before. Something usable in a fixed-function pipeline is preferable, mostly for the minor increase in compatibility and development time. Since it's only a minor increase, I will go with shaders and multipass rendering if necessary.
Not sure if any other clarification is necessary, but I'll update the question as needed.
On the texture combination part of the question:
Have you looked into 3d textures? As we're talking marching cubes I should probably immediately say that I'm explicitly not talking about volumetric textures. Instead you stack all your 2d textures into a 3d texture. You then encode each texture coordinate to be the 2d position it would be and the texture it would reference as the third coordinate. It works best if your textures are generally of the type where, logically, to transition from one type of pattern to another you have to go through the intermediaries.
An obvious use example is texture mapping to a simple height map — you might have a snow texture on top, a rocky texture below that, a grassy texture below that and a water texture at the bottom. If a vertex that references the water is next to one that references the snow then it is acceptable for the geometry fill to transition through the rock and grass texture.
An alternative is to do it in multiple passes using additive blending. For each texture, draw every face that uses that texture and draw a fade to transparent extending across any faces that switch from one texture to another.
You'll probably want to prep the depth buffer with a complete draw (with the colour masks all set to reject changes to the colour buffer) then switch to a GL_EQUAL depth test and draw again with writing to the depth buffer disabled. Drawing exactly the same geometry through exactly the same transformation should produce exactly the same depth values irrespective of issues of accuracy and precision. Use glPolygonOffset if you have issues.
On the coordinates part:
Popular and easy mappings are cylindrical, box and spherical. Conceptualise that your shape is bounded by a cylinder, box or sphere with a well defined mapping from surface points to texture locations. Then for each vertex in your shape, start at it and follow the normal out until you strike the bounding geometry. Then grab the texture location that would be at that position on the bounding geometry.
I guess there's a potential problem that normals tend not to be brilliant after marching cubes, but I'll wager you know more about that problem than I do.
This is a hard and interesting problem.
The simplest way is to avoid the issue completely by using 3D texture maps, especially if you just want to add some random surface detail to your isosurface geometry. Perlin noise based procedural textures implemented in a shader work very well for this.
The difficult way is to look into various algorithms for conformal texture mapping (also known as conformal surface parametrization), which aim to produce a mapping between 2D texture space and the surface of the 3D geometry which is in some sense optimal (least distorting). This paper has some good pictures. Be aware that the topology of the geometry is very important; it's easy to generate a conformal mapping to map a texture onto a closed surface like a brain, considerably more complex for higher genus objects where it's necessary to introduce cuts/tears/joins.
You might want to try making a UV Map of a mesh in a tool like Blender to see how they do it. If I understand your problem, you have a 3D field which defines a solid volume as well as a (continuous) color. You've created a mesh from the volume, and now you need to UV-map the mesh to a 2D texture with texels extracted from the continuous color space. In a tool you would define "seams" in the 3D mesh which you could cut apart so that the whole mesh could be laid flat to make a UV map. There may be aliasing in your texture at the seams, so when you render the mesh it will also be discontinuous at those seams (ie a triangle strip can't cross over the seam because it's a discontinuity in the texture).
I don't know any formal methods for flattening the mesh, but you could imagine cutting it along the seams and then treating the whole thing as a spring/constraint system that you drop onto a flat surface. I'm all about solving things the hard way. ;-)
Due to the issues with texturing and some of the constraints I have, I've chosen to write a different algorithm to build the geometry and handle texturing directly in that as it produces surfaces. It's somewhat less smooth than the marching cubes, but allows me to apply the texcoords in a way that works for my project (and is a bit faster).
For anyone interested in texturing marching cubes, or just blending textures, Tommy's answer is a very interesting technique and the links timday posted are excellent resources on flattening meshes for texturing. Thanks to both of them for their answers, hopefully they can be of use to others. :)
I'm finishing up on a 3D planet with ROAM (continuous level of detail).
My goal now is to have good quality render using textures.
I'm trying to find a way I can use a tiling system (small good textures combined), but in a way I can take advantage of my CLOD mesh.
Current algorithms (from what I've found) using this tiling systems produce a huge texture and then direcly apply it. That is not what I want... the planet is very big, and I want more power than simply increasing the texture size.
Is there any known algorithm/opengl feature for this kind of stuff?
I don't know much about shaders, but Is it possible to create one that paints a objects alone... I mean, not giving the texcoords, but putting the right color for every pixel (not vertex) of the mesh?
PS: My world is built using perlin noise... so I can get the height in any world point (height map with infinite resolution)
You have used 3D Perlin noise for the terrain, why not generate the texture as well? Generally, programs like Terragen, Vistapro and the like use altitude to randomly select a range of color from the palette, modify that color based on slope, and perhaps add detail from smaller textures based on both slope and altitude. In your case, distance could also modify detail. For that matter, 2d perlin noise would work well for detail texture.
Have you modified the heightmap at all? Something like an ocean would be hard to achieve with pure 3d Perlin noise, but flattening everything below a certain altitude and applying a nice algorithmic ocean texture (properly tuned 2d Perlin noise with transparency below a certain level) would look good.