I understand how a simple GLSL fog shader works, but how can it be applied? Applying it directly to a terrain mesh does not produce the desired "fog" result. How would one mimic the built-in fog effects of OpenGL with a shader? The only thing that I can think of is applying the shader to a series of encased spheres around the camera, but that seems like a lot of work for just some fog.
Update:
Some images to further explain.
This is the shader I have applied to my terrain mesh, and the result is not what I want:
http://puu.sh/31dft.jpg
This is the kind of effect I am looking to replicate:
http://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/4503932.jpg
Semi-realistic atmosphere rendering is an complex problem to which many (ongoing-) research is dedicated. In your reference photo there are essentially three major factors that can contribute to the particular composition: i. fog/haze ii. atmospheric scattering iii. altitude.
Simply put applying fog solely on objects such as terrain, is an inherently flawed concept, because fog occludes/obscures the transmittance of light. This includes the light from the sky. So in order to cover the scenario of fog being applied to the 'sky' another approach is required, involving post-processing. Essentially the position of every pixel needs to be reconstructed in 3d-space, and the fog algorithm needs to run over each of these.
Depending on particular the art-style this might be sufficient for your needs, however it's more complicated. This document, http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/D3DTutorial_Crytek.pdf gives a nice starting point regarding atmospheric rendering (it includes volumetric fog).
You have to set the fog color and the background color to be the same. Otherwise the effects look bizarre. The point of fog is to make distant objects "fade into the background". The problem with your image is that your background is bright blue, as if you wanted it to be a sunny, clear day. But the objects in your scene are fading to white, as if there was a very very thick fog. I suggest you find some compromise--use a grayish blue for both.
Related
I am making a simple pixel top-down game. And I want to add some simple lights there, but I don't know what the best way to do that. This image is an example of light what I want to realise.
http://imgur.com/a/PpYiR
When I googled that task, I saw only solutions for that kind of light.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVlYsGOkkyM
But I need to increase a brightness of the texture part when the light source is near. How can I do this if I am using textures with GL_QUADS without UV?
Ok, my response may not totally answer you question, but it will lead you down the right path.
It appears you are using immediate mode, this is now depreciated and changing to VBOs (vertex buffer objects) will make you life easier.
The lighting in the picture appears to be hand drawn. You cannot create that style of lighting exactly with even the best algorithm.
You really have two options to solve your problem, and both of them will require texture coordinates and shaders.
You could go with lightmaps, which use a pre generated texture multiplied over the texture of a quad. This is extremely fast, but requires some sort of tool to generate the lightmaps which might be a bit over your head at the moment.
Instead, learn shader based lighting. Many tutorials exist for 3d lighting but the principles remain the same for 2D.
Some Googling will get you the resources you need to implement shaders.
A basic distance based lighting algorithm will look like this:
GL_Color = texturecolor * 1.0/distance(light_position,world_position);
It multiplies the color of the texel by how far away the texel is from the light position. There are tutorials that go more into depth on this.
If you want to make the lighting look "retro" like in the first image,you can downsample the colors in a postprocesing step.
I am looking for a way to "fill" three-dimensional geometry with color, and quite possibly a texture at some time later on.
Suppose for a moment that you could physically phase your head into a concrete wall, logically you would see only darkness. In OpenGL, however, when you do this the world is naturally hollow and transparent due to culling and because of how the geometry is drawn. I want to simulate the darkness/color/texture within it instead.
I know some games do this by overlaying a texture/color directly over the hud--therefore blinding the player.
Is there another way to do this, though? Suppose the player is standing half in water; they can partially see below the waves. How would you fill it to prevent them from being able to see clearly below what is now half of their screen?
What is this concept even called?
A problem with the texture-in-front-of-the-camera method is a texture is 2D but you want to visualize a slice of a 3D volume. For the first thing you talk about, the head-inside-a-wall idea, I'll point you to "3D/volume texturing". For standing-half-in-water, you're after "volume rendering" with "absorption" (discussed by #user3670102).
3D texturing
The general idea here is you have some function that defines a colour everywhere in a 3D space, not just on a surface (as with regular texture mapping). This is nice because you can put geometry anywhere and colour it in the fragment shader based on the 3D position. Think of taking a slice through the volume and looking at the intersection colour.
For the head-in-a-wall effect you could draw a full screen polygon in front of the player (right on the near clipping plane, although you might want to push this forwards a bit so its not too small) and colour it based on a 3D function. Now it'll look properly solid and move ad the player does and not like you've cheaply stuck a texture over the screen.
The actual function could be defined with a 3D texture but that's very memory intensive. Instead, you could look into either procedural 3D colour (a procedural wood or brick shader is pretty common as an example). Even assuming a 2D texture is "extruded" through the volume will work, or better yet weight 3 textures (one for each axis) based on the angle of the intersection/surface you're drawing on.
Detecting an intersection with the geometry and the near clipping plane is probably the hardest bit here. If I were you I'd look at tricks with the z-buffer and make sure to draw everything as solid non-self-intersecting geometry. A simple idea might be to draw back faces only after drawing everything with front faces. If you can see back faces that part of the near plane must be inside something. For these pixels you could calculate the near clipping plane position in world space and apply a 3D texture. Though I suspect there are faster ways than drawing everything twice.
In reality there would probably be no light getting to what you see and it should be black, but I guess just ignore this and render the colour directly, unlit.
Absorption
This sounds way harder than it actually is. If you have some transparent solid that's all the one colour ("homogeneous") then it removes light the further light has to travel through it. Think of many alpha-transparent surfaces, take the limit and you have an exponential. The light remaining is close to 1/exp(dist) or exp(-dist). Google "Beer's Law". From here,
vec3 Absorbance = WaterColor * WaterDensity * -WaterDepth;
vec3 Transmittance = exp(Absorbance);
A great way to find distances through something is to render the back faces (or seabed/water floor) with additive blending using a shader that draws distance to a floating point texture. Then switch to subtractive blending and render all the front faces (or water surface). You're left with a texture containing distances/depth for the above equation.
Volume Rendering
Combining the two ideas, the material is both a transparent solid but the colour (and maybe density) varies throughout the volume. This starts to get pretty complicated if you have large amounts of data and want it to be fast. A straight forward way to render this is to numerically integrate a ray through the 3D texture (or procedural function, whatever you're using), at the same time applying the absorption function. A basic brute force Euler integration might start a ray for each pixel on the near plane, then march forwards at even distances. Over each step while you march you assume the colour remains constant and apply absorption, keeping track of how much light you have left. A quick google brings up this.
This seems related to looking through what's called "participating media". On the less extreme end, you'd have light fog, or smoky haze. In the middle could be, say, dirty water. And the extreme case would be your head-in-the-wall example.
Doing this in a physically accurate way isn't trivial, because the darkening effect is more pronounced when the thickness of the media is greater.
But you can fake this by making some assumptions and giving the interior geometry (under the water or inside the wall) darker by reduced lighting or using darker colors. If you care about the depth effect, look at OpenGL and fog.
For underwater, you can make the back side of the water a semi-transparent color that causes stuff above it to have a suitable change in color.
If you really want to go nuts with accuracy, look at Kajia's Rendering Equation. That covers everything (including stuff that glows), but generally needs simplification and approximations to be more useful.
I am trying to create the effect of the water surface thickness with a vertex-fragment shader.
I am in a 3D game environment but It's a scroll view so a "2D" view.
Here is a good tutorial of creating such effect in real 2D using fragment shader.
But this can't be used in my case I think.
For the moment I have only a plane were I apply refraction.
And I want to apply the water thickness effect. But I don't know how to do it.
I am not trying to create some water deformation/displacement using vertex for the moment, this is not the point.
I don't know if it's possible with a simple quad maybe should I use an object like this.
Here are some examples.
Thanks a lot !
[EDIT] Added Rayman water effect to have a better reference of the effect.
I am trying to create 2D Water effect with a vertex-fragment shader on a simple quad.
Your first misconception is thinking in 2D. What you see in your right picture is the interaction of light with a 2 surface in a 3D space. A simple quad will not suffice.
For water you need some surface displacement. You can either simulate this by solving some wave equation. Or you're using a fourier transform based approach. I suggest the second. Next you render your scene "regular" for everything above the water, then "murky and refracted" for everything below the water line. Render both to textures.
Then You render the water surface. When looking at the Air→Water Interface (i.e. from above) use a Fresnel reflection term, i.e. mix between top reflection and see through depending on the angle of incidence, and for a too small angle emulate Brewster reflection. For the Water→Air Interface (i.e. from below) you do similar, only you don't need the Fresnel term, but only the Brewster term, to account for total internal reflection.
Since you do all mixing in the fragment shader, you don't need blending, hence no need to sort drawing operations for the water depth.
Yes, rendering water is not trivial.
I am unsure of how to describe what I'm after, so I drew a picture to help:
My question, is it possible within OpenGL to create the illusion of those pixel looking bumps on a single polygon, without having to resort to using many polygons? And if it is, what's the method?
I think what your looking for is actually Parallax mapping (Or Parallax Occlusion mapping).
Demos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01owTezYC-w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcAsJdo7dME&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njKdLvmBl88
Parralax mapping basically works by using the height map to alter the texture UV coordinate being used.
The main disadvantage to parallax is that anything that appears to be 'outside' the polygon will be clipped (think of looking at an image on a 3D tv), so it's best for things indented in a surface rather than sticking out of it (although you can reduce this by making the polygon lager than the visible texture area). It's also fairly complex and would need to be combined with other shader techniques for a good effect.
Bump mapping works by using a texture for normal's, this makes the light's shading appear to be 3D however it does not change 3D data depending on the position of the viewer only the shading. Bump mapping would also be fairly useless for the OP's sample image since the surface is all the same angle just at different heights, bump mapping relies on the changes in the surfaces angles. You would have to slope the edges like this.
Displacement mapping/tessellation uses a texture to generate more polygons rather than just being 1 polygon.
There's a video comparing all 3 here
EDIT: There is also Relief mapping, which is a similar to parallax. See demo. There's a comparison video too (it's a bit lowquality but relief looks like it gives better depth).
I think what you're after is bump mapping. The link goes to a simple tutorial.
You may also be thinking of displacement mapping.
Of the techniques mentioned in other people's answers:
Bump mapping is the easiest to achieve, but doesn't do any occlusion.
Parallax mapping is probably the most complex to achieve, and doesn't work well in all cases.
Displacement mapping requires high-end hardware and drivers, and creates additional geometry.
Actually modeling the polygons is always an option.
It really depends on how close you expect the viewer to be and how prominent the bumps are. If you're flying down the Death Star trench, you'll need to model the bumps or use displacement mapping. If you're a few hundred meters up, bumpmapping should suffice.
If you have DX11 class hardware then you could tessellate the polygon and then apply displacement mapping. See http://developer.nvidia.com/node/24. But then it gets a little complicated to get it running and develop something on top of it.
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. :)