Use OpenGL (version 330) multisample, in QT framework.
The rendering image is like a star shape.
I use fragment shader to render the shape intensity on the black canvas.
I do not use OpenGL primitives.
When multisample is not used, and when the rendering output canvas has a smaller resolution (say 400x400 pixels), I can see aliasing effects along star shape edges.
If I increase the resolution, say 1500x1500 pixels, then the aliasing effects are much less obvious. So I think mutlisampling should be able to improve the result.
Now, in order to improve speed, I do not increase the resolution of the render buffer. Instead, I decide to try to use multisampling to reduce aliasing effects.
int num_samples = 2; // 4; // I guess the maximum for most graphic cards are 8
GLuint tex;
glGenTextures(1, &tex);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D_MULTISAMPLE, tex);
glTexImage2DMultisample( GL_TEXTURE_2D_MULTISAMPLE, num_samples, GL_R11F_G11F_B10F, width, height, true );
GLuint fbo;
glGenFramebuffers( 1, &fbo );
glBindFramebuffer( GL_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo );
glFramebufferTexture2D( GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, GL_TEXTURE_2D_MULTISAMPLE, tex, 0 );
glViewport(0,0, width, height);
glEnable(GL_MULTISAMPLE);
// ... some code
// draw a rectangle, as it is 2D image processing
// OpenGL render program release
// now convert multisample frame buffer fbo to a regular frame buffer qopenglFramebufferOjbectP
// qopenglFramebufferOjbectP is QOpenGLFramebufferObject
glBindFramebuffer(GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo);
glBindFramebuffer(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, qopenglFramebufferOjbectP->handle());
glBlitFramebuffer(0, 0, width, height, 0, 0, width, height, GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT, GL_LINEAR);
The whole code seems not to be totally wrong, since the output is the desired shape, except the anti aliasing effect.
The problem is:
Either I use multisample (with different sample numbers as 2 4, or 8), or I do not use multisample, the results are the same. I specially wrote the results out to images, and compared them side by side.
But if multisampling takes effect, the results should be expected to have less aliasing effects than that when multismaple is not used.
I use fragment shader to render the shape intensity on the black canvas. I do not use OpenGL primitives.
The basic idea of multisampling is that you're doing the same number of fragment shader invocations as non-multisampling, but a particular fragment only writes the outputs to specific samples in each pixel based on the geometry of the primitives you render. You are rendering what I presume is a quad; any apparent geometry is a fiction created by the fragment shader. Hence you have gained no benefit from the technique.
Imposter-based techniques don't usually benefit from multisampling.
There are ways to handle this, of course. The most obvious is to turn on per-sample shading, but this also effectively turns multisampling into super-sampling. That is, it isn't cheap.
A better idea would be to explicitly output a coverage mask with gl_SampleMask. It's not easy and it depends on how you generate your geometry. The idea is to, for each sample that a fragment covers, detect if that sample is within the imposter-generated geometry. If so, set that sample's mask to 1; if not, set it to 0. Thus, you generate 1 output value, and it is broadcast to the non-zero samples.
Both this and per-sample shading require GL 4.0+ (or ARB_sample_shading).
I have an OpenGL Texture and want to be able to read back a single pixel's value, so I can display it on the screen. If the texture is a regular old RGB texture or the like, this is no problem: I take an empty Framebuffer Object that I have lying around, attach the texture to COLOR0 on the framebuffer and call:
glReadPixels(x, y, 1, 1, GL_RGBA, GL_FLOAT, &c);
Where c is essentially a float[4].
However, when it is a depth texture, I have to go down a different code path, setting the DEPTH attachment instead of the COLOR0, and calling:
glReadPixels(x, y, 1, 1, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_FLOAT, &c);
where c is a float. This works fine on my Windows 7 computer running NVIDIA GeForce 580, but causes an error on my old 2008 MacBook pro. Specifically, after attaching the depth texture to the framebuffer, if I call glCheckFrameBufferStatus(GL_READ_BUFFER), I get GL_FRAMEBUFFER_INCOMPLETE_READ_BUFFER.
After searching the OpenGL documentation, I found this line, which seems to imply that OpenGL does not support reading from a depth component of a framebuffer if there is no color attachment:
GL_FRAMEBUFFER_INCOMPLETE_READ_BUFFER is returned if GL_READ_BUFFER is not GL_NONE
and the value of GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ATTACHMENT_OBJECT_TYPE is GL_NONE for the color
attachment point named by GL_READ_BUFFER.
Sure enough, if I create a temporary color texture and bind it to COLOR0, no errors occur when I readPixels from the depth texture.
Now creating a temporary texture every time (EDIT: or even once and having GPU memory tied up by it) through this code is annoying and potentially slow, so I was wondering if anyone knew of an alternative way to read a single pixel from a depth texture? (Of course if there is no better way I will keep around one texture to resize when needed and use only that for the temporary color attachment, but this seems rather roundabout).
The answer is contained in your error message:
if GL_READ_BUFFER is not GL_NONE
So do that; set the read buffer to GL_NONE. With glReadBuffer. Like this:
glBindFramebuffer(GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo); //where fbo is your FBO.
glReadBuffer(GL_NONE);
That way, the FBO is properly complete, even though it only has a depth texture.
I have created a texture using
glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE_NV, 0, CONSENSUS_DEPTH_COMPONENT, width, height, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_FLOAT, 0);
This texture is used in other code and filled with depth. Now I want to copy the depth values to an RGBA texture (doesn't matter which color channel).
How can I do this?
If it needs to be fast, I'd say render an orthograhic quad the size of the texture and use a shader to read from the depth texture and write to the target texture.
If performance doesn't matter that much you can use PBOs (might even be faster depending on your render pipeline but stalls the CPU). Here's an overview on said PBOs
I don't know of any inherent OpenGL method to do this.
Im trying to achieve fade-to-black effect, but i dont know how to do it. I tried several things but they fail due to how opengl works
I will explain how it would work:
If i draw 1 white pixel and move it around each frame for one pixel to some direction, each frame the screen pixels will get one R/G/B value less (of range 0-255), thus after 255 frames the white pixel will be fully black. So if i move the white pixel around, i would see a gradient trail going from white to black evenly 1 color value difference compared to previous pixel color.
Edit: I would prefer to know non-shader way of doing this, but if its not possible then i can accept shader-way too.
Edit2: Since there is some confusion around here, I would like to tell that i can do this kind of effect already by drawing a black transparent quad over my whole scene. BUT, this does not work as i want it to work; there is a limit on the darkness the pixels can get, so it will always leave some of the pixels "visible" (above zero color value) because: 1*0.9 = 0.9 -> rounded to 1 again, etc. I can "fix" this by making the trail shorter, but i want to be able to adjust the trail lenght as much as possible and instead of bilinear (if thats the right word) interpolation i want linear (so it would always reduce -1 from each r,g,b value in 0-255 scale, instead of using a percent value).
Edit3: Still some confusion left, so lets be clear: i want to improve the effect that is done by disabling GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT from glClear(), i dont want to see the pixels on my screen FOREVER, so i want to make them darker in time, by drawing a quad over my scene that will reduce each of the pixels color value by 1 (in 0-255 scale).
Edit4: I'll make it simple, i want OpenGL method for this, the effect should use as little power, memory or bandwidth as possible. this effect is supposed to work without clearing the screen pixels, so if i draw a transparent quad over my scene, the previous pixels drawn will get darker etc. But as explained above few times, its not working very well. The big NO's are: 1) reading pixels from screen, modifying them one by one in a for loop and then uploading back. 2) rendering my objects X times with different darknesses to emulate the trail effect. 3) multiplying the color values is not an option since it wont make the pixels into black, they will stay on the screen forever at certain brightness (see explanation somewhere above).
If i draw 1 white pixel and move it around each frame for one pixel to some direction, each frame the screen pixels will get one R/G/B value less (of range 0-255), thus after 255 frames the white pixel will be fully black. So if i move the white pixel around, i would see a gradient trail going from white to black evenly 1 color value difference compared to previous pixel color.
Before I explain how to do this, I would like to say that the visual effect you're going for is a terrible visual effect and you should not use it. Subtracting a value from each of the RGB colors will produce a different color, not a darker version of the same color. The RGB color (255,128,0), if you subtract 1 from it 128 times, will become (128, 0, 0). The first color is brown, the second is a dark red. These are not the same.
Now, since you haven't really explained this very well, I have to make some guesses. I am assuming that there are no "objects" in what you are rendering. There is no state. You're simply drawing stuff at arbitrary locations, and you don't remember what you drew where, nor do you want to remember what was drawn where.
To do what you want, you need two off-screen buffers. I recommend using FBOs and screen-sized textures for these. The basic algorithm is simple. You render the previous frame's image to the current image, using a blend mode that "subtracts 1" from the colors you write. Then you render the new stuff you want to the current image. Then you display that image. After that, you switch which image is previous and which is current, and do the process all over again.
Note: The following code will assume OpenGL 3.3 functionality.
Initialization
So first, during initialization (after OpenGL is initialized), you must create your screen-sized textures. You also need two screen-sized depth buffers.
GLuint screenTextures[2];
GLuint screenDepthbuffers[2];
GLuint fbos[2]; //Put these definitions somewhere useful.
glGenTextures(2, screenTextures);
glGenRenderbuffers(2, screenDepthbuffers);
glGenFramebuffers(2, fbos);
for(int i = 0; i < 2; ++i)
{
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, screenTextures[i]);
glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA8, SCREEN_WIDTH, SCREEN_HEIGHT, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, NULL);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_BASE_LEVEL, 0);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAX_LEVEL, 0);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0);
glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, screenDepthBuffers[i]);
glRenderbufferStorage(GL_RENDERBUFFER, GL_DEPTH24_STENCIL8, SCREEN_WIDTH, SCREEN_HEIGHT);
glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, 0);
glBindFramebuffer(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo[i]);
glFramebufferTexture(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, screenTextures[i], 0);
glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT, screenDepthBuffers[i]);
if(glCheckFramebufferStatus(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER) != GL_FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE) {
//Error out here.
}
glBindFramebuffer(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, 0);
}
Drawing Previous Frame
The next step will be drawing the previous frame's image to the current image.
To do this, we need to have the concept of a previous and current FBO. This is done by having two variables: currIndex and prevIndex. These values are indices into our GLuint arrays for textures, renderbuffers, and FBOs. They should be initialized (during initialization, not for each frame) as follows:
currIndex = 0;
prevIndex = 1;
In your drawing routine, the first step is to draw the previous frame, subtracting one (again, I strongly suggest using a real blend here).
This won't be full code; there will be pseudo-code that I expect you to fill in.
glBindFramebuffer(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, fbos[currIndex]);
glClearColor(...);
glClearDepth(...);
glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT|GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT|GL_STENCIL_BUFFER_BIT);
glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE0 + 0);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, screenTextures[prevIndex]);
glUseProgram(BlenderProgramObject); //The shader will be talked about later.
RenderFullscreenQuadWithTexture();
glUseProgram(0);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0);
The RenderFullscreenQuadWithTexture function does exactly what it says: renders a quad the size of the screen, using the currently bound texture. The program object BlenderProgramObject is a GLSL shader that does our blend operation. It fetches from the texture and does the blend. Again, I'm assuming you know how to set up a shader and so forth.
The fragment shader would have a main function that looks something like this:
shaderOutput = texture(prevImage, texCoord) - (1.0/255.0);
Again, I strongly advise this:
shaderOutput = texture(prevImage, texCoord) * (0.05);
If you don't know how to use shaders, then you should learn. But if you don't want to, then you can get the same effect using a glTexEnv function. And if you don't know what those are, I suggest learning shaders; it's so much easier in the long run.
Draw Stuff As Normal
Now, you just render everything you would as normal. Just don't unbind the FBO; we still want to render to it.
Display the Rendered Image on Screen
Normally, you would use a swapbuffer call to display the results of your rendering. But since we rendered to an FBO, we can't do that. Instead, we have to do something different. We must blit our image to the backbuffer and then swap buffers.
glBindFramebuffer(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, 0);
glBindFramebuffer(GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, fbos[currIndex]);
glBlitFramebuffer(0, 0, SCREEN_WIDTH, SCREEN_HEIGHT, 0, 0, SCREEN_WDITH, SCREEN_HEIGHT, GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT, GL_NEAREST);
glBindFramebuffer(GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, 0);
//Do OpenGL swap buffers as normal
Switch Images
Now we need to do one more thing: switch the images that we're using. The previous image becomes current and vice versa:
std::swap(currIndex, prevIndex);
And you're done.
You may want to render a black rectangle with alpha going from 1.0 to 0.0 using glBlendFunc (GL_ONE, GL_SRC_ALPHA).
Edit in response to your comment (reply doesn't fit in a comment):
You cannot fade single pixels depending on their age with a simple fade-to-black operation. Usually a render target does not "remember" what has drawn to it in previous frames. I could think of a way to do this by alternatingly rendering to one of a pair of FBOs and using their alpha channel for it, but you needed a shader there. So what you would do is first render the FBO containing the pixels at their previous positions, decreasing their alpha value by one, dropping them when alpha == 0, otherwise darkening them whenever their alpha decreases, then render the pixels at their current positions with alpha == 255.
If you only have moving pixels:
render FBO 2 to FBO 1, darkening each pixel in it by a scale (skip during first pass)
render moving pixels to FBO 1
render FBO 1 to FBO 2 (FBO 2 is the "age" buffer)
render FBO 2 to screen
If you want to modify some scene (i.e. have a scene and moving pixels in it):
set glBlendFunc (GL_ONE, GL_ZERO)
render FBO 2 to FBO 1, reducing each alpha > 0.0 in it by a scale (skip during first pass)
render moving pixels to FBO 1
render FBO 1 to FBO 2 (FBO 2 is the "age" buffer)
render the scene to screen
set glBlendFunc (GL_ONE, GL_SRC_ALPHA)
render FBO 2 to screen
Actually the scale should be (float) / 255.0 / 255.0 to make the components equally fade away (and not one that started at a lower value become zero before the others do).
If you only have a few moving pixels, you could re-render the pixel at all previous positions up to 255 "ticks" back.
Since you need to re-render each of the pixels anyway, just render each one with the proper color gradient: Darker, the older the pixel is. If you have a real lot of pixels, the dual FBO approach
might work.
I am writing ticks, and not frames, because frames can take a varying amount of time depending on renderer and hardware, but you probably want to have the pixel trail fade away within a constant time. That means you need to dim each pixel only after so-and-so many milliseconds, keeping their color for the frames in between.
One non-shader way of doing this, especially if the fade to black is the only thing that is going on the screen is to grab the contents of the screen via readpixels iirc, pop those into a texture, and put a rectangle up onto the screen with that texture, then you can modulate the color of the rectangle to towards black to do the efect that you want to accomplish.
It is the drivers, Windows itself does not support OpenGL or only a low Version, I think 1.5. All newer versions come with drivers from ATI or NVIDIA, Intel etc.
Are you using different cards?
What version of OpenGL are you effectivly using?
It's situations like this that make it so I cannot use pure OpenGL. I am not sure if your project has room for it (which it may not if you're using another windowing API), or if the added complexity would be worth it, but adding a 2D library like SDL which works with OpenGL would allow you to directly work with the display surface's pixels in a reasonable fashion, as well as just pixels in general, which OpenGL generally doesn't make easy.
Then all you would need to do is run through the display surface's pixels before OpenGL renders it's geometry, and subtract 1 from each RGB component.
That's the easiest solution I can see anyway, if using additional libraries with OpenGL is an option.
I'm rendering into an OpenGL offscreen framebuffer object and like to save it as an image. Note that the FBO is larger than the display size. I can render into the offscreen buffer and use it as texture, which works. I can "scroll" this larger texture through the display using an offset, which makes me confident, that I render into a larger context than the window.
If I save the offscreen buffer to an image file it always gets cropped. The code fragment for saving is:
void ofFBOTexture::saveImage(string fileName) {
glReadBuffer(GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0_EXT);
// get the raw buffer from ofImage
unsigned char* pixels = imageSaver.getPixels();
glReadPixels(0, 0, 1024, 1024, GL_RGB, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, pixels);
imageSaver.saveImage(fileName);
}
Please note, that the image content is cropped, the visible part is saved correctly (which means no error in pixel formats, GL_RGB issues etc.), but the remaining space is filled with one color.
So, my question is - what am I doing wrong?
Finally I solved the issue.
I have to activate the fbo for saving its contents:
glBindFramebufferEXT(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT, fbo);
// save code
...
glBindFramebufferEXT(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT, 0);
while only selecting the fbo for glReadPixels via
glReadBuffer(GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0_EXT);
doesn't suffice.
(All other things where correct and tested, eg. viewport sizes, width and height of buffer, image texture etc.)
Two questions to start: How are you creating imageSaver and are you sure your width and height are correct (e.g. are you trying to save a 1024 x 1024 image? What size are you getting)?
You're not doing anything wrong, this has been quite common behaviour with OpenGL graphics drivers for a long time - I recall running up against exactly the same issue on nVidia Geforce 3 cards at least a decade ago, and I adopted a similar solution - rendering to an offscreen texture.
This sounds like you have the wrong viewport size or something similar.