Darkening the brightness of a normal? Flat shading - opengl

I was wondering how you would go about darkening the overall brightness to a normal. I am using flat shading and am calculating surface normals. Would I just decrease the magnitude of the normal? I have tried subtracting from normal.x, normal.y, and normal.z but the effect is only darker when viewed from the correct angle.

If you want to darken the flat-shaded surface by tweaking just normals you should multiply them by factor:
less than 1 to make them darker (less responsive to light)
more than 1 to make them more responsive to light (lighter only when lit)
However this is not going to work in all cases (e.g. smooth shading) because there normals get interpolated and normalized within smooth shading calculations.
Yet I strongly recommend to leave normals normalized.
Proper solution would be to tweak your ambient and diffuse lights brightness and/or your objects materials ambient and diffuse components.

Related

OpenGL shader gamma on solid color

I want to implement gamma correction on my OpenGL 3D renderer, I understand that it's absolutely relevant on texture loaded in sRGB, so I do this:
vec4 texColor;
texColor = texture(src_tex_unit0, texCoordVarying);
texColor = vec4(pow(texColor.rgb,vec3(2.2)),1.0);
vec4 colorPreGamma = texColor * (vec4(ambient,1.0) + vec4(diffuse,1.0));
fragColor = vec4(pow(colorPreGamma.rgb, vec3(1.0/gamma)),1.0);
But my question is about solid color, when the surface of the 3D object I want lit is not textured but just colored by a per vertex RGB value. In this case, do I have to transform my color in Linear space, and after the lighting operation, transform back to gamma space like I do for a texture?
Does this apply when my light are colored?
In this case, do I have to transform my color in Linear space, and after the lighting operation, transform back to gamma space like I do for a texture?
That depends: what colorspace are your colors in?
You're not doing this correction because of where they come from; you're doing it because of what the colors actually are. If the value is not linear, then you must linearize it before using it, regardless of where it comes from.
You are ultimately responsible for putting that color there. So you must have to know whether that color is in linear RGB or sRGB colorspace. And if the color is not linear, then you have to linearize it before you can get meaningful numbers from it.
In OpenGL there isn't a huge distinction between color data and other kinds of data: if you have a vec3 you can access components as .xyz or .rgb. It's all just data.
So ask yourself this: "Do I have to gamma correct my vertex positions in the vertex shader?"
Of course not, because your vertex positions are already in linear space. So if you are similarly setting your vertex colors in linear space, again no gamma correction is needed.
In other words, do you imagine vec3(0.5, 0.5, 0.5) as being a gray that is visually halfway between black and white? Then you need gamma correction.
Do you imagine it as being mathematically halfway between black and white (in terms of measurable light intensity)? Then it's already linear.

Bypass classical deferred shading light volumes

I would like to "bypass" the classical light volume approach of deferred lighting.
Usually, when you want to affect pixels within a pointlight volume, you can simply render a sphere mesh.
I would like to try another way to do that, the idea is to render a cube which encompass the sphere, the cube is "circumscribes" to the sphere so each face's center is a sphere's point. Then you only have to know from your point of view which fragment would be a part of the circle (the sphere on your screen) if you had render the sphere instead.
So the main problem is to know which fragment will have to be discarded.
How could I do that:
Into the fragment shader, I have my "camera" world coordinates, my fragment world coordinates, my sphere world center, and my sphere radius.
Thus I have the straight line whose the orientation vector is modelized by camera-fragment world points.
And I can build my sphere equation.
Finally I can know if the line intersect the sphere.
Is is correct to say that, from my point of view, if the line intersect the sphere, thus this fragment must be considered as an highlighted fragment (a fragment that would have been rendered if I had rendered a sphere instead) ?
Thus the check "lenght(fragment - sphereCenter) <= sphereRadius" doesn't really mean something here because the fragment is not on the sphere.
So what?
The standard deferred shading solution for lights is to render a full-screen quad. The purpose of rendering a sphere instead is to avoid doing a bunch of per-fragment calculations for fragments which are outside of the light source's effect. This means that the center of that sphere is the light source, and its radius represents the maximum distance for which the source has an effect.
So the length from the fragment (that is, reconstructed from your g-buffer data, not the fragment produced by the cube) to the sphere's center is very much relevant. That's the length between the fragment and the light source. If that is larger than the sphere radius (AKA: maximum reach of the light), then you can cull the fragment.
Or you can just let your light attenuation calculations do the same job. After all, in order for lights to not look like they are being cropped, that sphere radius must also be used with some form of light attenuation. That is, when a fragment is at that distance, the attenuation of the light must be either 0 or otherwise negligibly small.
As such... it doesn't matter if you're rendering a sphere, cube, or a full-screen quad. You can either cull the fragment or let the light attenuation do its job.
However, if you want to possibly save performance by discarding the fragment before reading any of the g-buffers, you can do this. Assuming you have access to the camera-space position of the sphere/cube's center in the FS:
Convert the position of the cube's fragment into camera-space. You can do this by reverse-transforming gl_FragCoord, but it'd probably be faster to just pass the camera-space position to the fragment shader. It's not like your VS is doing a lot of work or anything.
Because the camera-space position is in camera space, it already represents a direction from the camera into the scene. So now, use this direction to perform part of ray/sphere intersection. Namely, you stop once you compute the discriminant (to avoid an expensive square-root). The discriminant is:
float A = dot(cam_position, cam_position);
float B = -2 * (dot(cam_position, cam_sphere_center);
float C = (dot(cam_sphere_center, cam_sphere_center)) - (radius * radius)
float Discriminant = (B * B) - 4 * A * C;
If the discriminant is negative, discard the fragment. Otherwise, do your usual stuff.

Why is my GLSL shader rendering a cleavage?

I'm working on a deferred lighting technique in 2D, using a frame buffer to accumulate light sources using the GL_MAX blend equation.
Here's what I get when rendering one light source (the geometry is a quad without a texture, I'm only using a fragment shader for colouring) to my buffer:
Which is exactly what I want - attenuation from the light source. However, when two light sources are near each other, when they overlap, they seem to produce a lower RGB value where they meet, like so:
Why is there a darker line between the two? I was expecting that with GL_MAX blend equation they would smoothly blend into each other, using the maximal value of the fragments in each location.
Here's the setup for the FBO (using LibGDX):
Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0.14f, 0.14f, 0.19f, 1);
Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
Gdx.gl.glBlendEquation(GLMAX_BLEND_EQUATION);
Gdx.gl.glBlendFunc(GL20.GL_SRC_COLOR, GL20.GL_DST_COLOR);
Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL20.GL_BLEND);
I don't think the call to glBlendFunc is actually necessary when using this equation. GLMAX_BLEND_EQUATION is set to 0x8008.
varying vec2 v_texCoords;
varying vec2 v_positionRelativeToLight;
uniform sampler2D u_texture;
uniform vec3 u_lightPosition;
uniform vec3 u_lightColor;
void main() {
float distanceToLight = length(v_positionRelativeToLight);
float falloffVarA = 0.1;
float falloffVarB = 1.0;
float attenuation = 1.0 / (1.0 + (falloffVarA*distanceToLight) + (falloffVarB*distanceToLight*distanceToLight));
float minDistanceOrAttenuation = min(attenuation, 1.0-distanceToLight);
float combined = minDistanceOrAttenuation * attenuation;
gl_FragColor = vec4(combined, combined, combined, 1.0);
}
There are extra variables passed in there as this fragment shader is usually more complicated, but I've cut it down to just show how the attenuation and blending is behaving.
This happens between every light source that I render where they meet - rather than the colour that I'm expecting, the meeting of two light sources - the equidistant point between the two quads, is a darker colour that I'm expecting. Any idea why and how to fix it?
This is the result of subtracting the first image from the second:
The background on the first isn't quite black, hence the yellowing on the right, but otherwise you can clearly see the black region on the left where original values were preserved, the darker arc where values from both lights were evaluated but the right was greater, then all the area on the right that the original light didn't touch.
I therefore think you're getting max-pick blending. But what you want is additive blending:
Gdx.gl.glBlendFunc(GL20.GL_ONE, GL20.GL_ONE);
... and leave the blend equation on the default of GL_FUNC_ADD.
Your result is the expected appearance for maximum blending (which is just like the lighten blend mode in Photoshop). The dark seam looks out of place perhaps because of the non-linear falloff of each light, but it's mathematically correct. If you introduce a light with a bright non-white color to it, it will look much more objectionable.
You can get around this if you render your lights to a frame buffer with inverted colors and multiplicative blending, and then render the frame buffer with inverted colors. Then the math works out to not have the seams, but it won't look unusually bright like what additive blending produces.
Use a pure white clear color on your frame buffer and then render the lights with the standard GL_ADD blend equation and the blend function GL_ONE_MINUS_DST_COLOR. Then render your FBO texture to the screen, inverting the colors again.
Two lights drawn using your method
Two lights drawn additively
Two lights, drawn sequentially with GL_ONE_MINUS_DST_COLOR, GL_ZERO and GL_ADD
The above result, inverted

Should the gl_FragColor value be normalized?

I am writing a Phong lighting shader and I have a hard time deciding whether the value I pass to gl_FragColor should be normalized or not.
If I use normalized values, the lighting is a bit weird. For example an object far away from a light source (un-lighted) would have its color determined by the sum of the emissive component, ambient component and global ambiental light. Let us say that adds up to (0.3, 0.3, 0.3). The normal for this is roughly (0.57, 0.57, 0.57), which is quite more luminous than what I'm expecting.
However, if I use non-normalized values, for close objects the specular areas get really, really bright and I have to make sure I generally use low values for my material constants.
As a note, I am normalizing only the RGB component and the alpha component is always 1.
I am a bit swamped and I could not find anything related to this. Either that or my searches were completely wrong.
No. Normalizing the color creates an interesting effect, but I think you don't really want it most, if not all of the time.
Normalization of the color output causes loss of information, even though it may seem to provide greater detail to a scene in some cases. If all your fragments have their color normalized, it means that all RGB vectors have their norm equal to 1. This means that there are colors that simply cannot exist in your output: white (norm = sqrt(3)), bright colors such as yellow (norm = sqrt(2)), dark colors such as dark red (norm(0.5, 0.0, 0.0) = 0.5), etc. Another issue you may face is normalizing zero vectors (i.e. black).
Another way to understand why color normalization is wrong, think about the less general case of rendering a grayscale image. As there is only one color component, normalization does not really make sense at all as it would make all your colors 1.0.
The problem with using the values without normalization arises from the fact that your output image has to have its color values clamped to a fixed interval: [0, 255] or [0.0, 1.0]. As the specular parts of your object reflect more light than those that only reflect diffuse light, quite possibly the computed color value may excede even (1.0, 1.0, 1.0) and get clamped to white for most of the specular area, therefore these areas become, perhaps, too bright.
A simple solution would be to lower the material constant values, or the light intensity. You could go one step further and make sure that the values for the material constants and light intensity are chosen such that the computed color value cannot excede (1.0, 1.0, 1.0). The same result could be achieved with a simple division of the computed color value if consistent values are used for all the materials and all the lights in the scene, but it is kind of overkill, as the scene would probably be too dark.
The more complex, but better looking solution involves HDR rendering and exposure filters such as bloom to obtain more photo-realistic images. This basically means rendering the scene into a float buffer which can handle a greater range than the [0, 255] RGB buffer, then simulating the camera or human eye behavior of adapting to a certain light intensity and the image artefacts caused by this mechanism (i.e. bloom).

glsl effect on low poly surface

I've got a vertex/fragment shader, point light and attenuation, I need to apply such shader to a cube face and I need to see a change in gradation of colours, if I use an high poly mesh
everything works quite well and the effect it's nice my goal is to have a gradient on this low poly mesh.
I tried to do this gl_FragColor = vec4(n,1) n = normal but I get a solid colour per surface
and this can be the reason why I don't see a gradation?
cheers
It is correct behaviour that you are observing. Cube is perfectly flat, thus it's normals per face vertex are the same.
Note however, that in calculations of Phong lighting you also should use the position of fragment, which is interpolated between 3 (or 4, when using quads) vertices of the given (sub)face. It can be used to calculate angle between light position and eye vector in the given fragment's position.
I've experienced similar problems lately, and I figured out that your cube really needs to shine, if you want to see something non-flat; and I mean literally. Set the shininess to reasonably high value (250-500). You should see a focused, moving point of light on the face that is reflecting directly to you. If not, your lightning shader is probably wrong.