I'm trying to make a program that handles graphics and I am not quite sure how to implement zooming. I have done a zooming effect with primitive shapes such as lines and circles (with SDL_gfxPrimitives) by scaling them down but that wont work for a picture. How would I implement zooming?
There is a SDL library that supports zooming:
SDL2_gfx Library
The SDL_gfx library evolved out of the SDL_gfxPrimitives code which
provided basic drawing routines such as lines, circles or polygons and
SDL_rotozoom which implemented a interpolating rotozoomer for SDL
surfaces.
The current components of the SDL_gfx library are:
Graphic Primitives (SDL_gfxPrimitves.h)
Rotozoomer (SDL_rotozoom.h)
Framerate control (SDL_framerate.h)
MMX image filters (SDL_imageFilter.h)
Custom Blit functions (SDL_gfxBlitFunc.h)
Your question is not specific enough to produce a specific answer that is likely to get you what you appear to be looking for.
What I can offer you is the suggestion that you first come up with a way to represent zooming.
If you already know how to draw a picture, consider the fact that when it comes to computer graphics, it is almost always the case that "zooming in" or "zooming out" is nothing more than drawing your picture at a progressively larger or smaller size.
With that in mind, maybe you will begin to see that a reasonable way to represent the concept of zooming is with some form of Camera class that will unambiguously determine the size and location of the pictures you draw.
Related
I have made mostly generic UI framework that uses SDL2. All my core code is largely complete and I'm at point of adding different controls.
I'm trying to find some nice drawing library for C++ that will allow me to draw controls on screen little bit nicer, I have option that images can be used for controls also but that is not resolution independent and I can draw them also using SDLs simple rectangles and lines right now.
Abstraction of controls rendering allows for implementation of drawing library that can be used just for visual representation.
I would like to skip the part of making my own drawing library general requirements would be:
Multi platform (win, linux, osx is a must)
Not dependant on 100s of other libraries. (As low as possible if
possible)
Ability to draw shapes (rectangle, rounded rect, ellipse...)
Drawing outlines of shapes would be nice
Shadows extremely nice (but I'm sure i would have to do this, just wishful)
Different types of gradients to fill shapes
TTF support would be nice but not mandatory I use SDLs
It should be compatible with SDL at least in a way that I can get
back anything convertible to SDL_Surface or SDL_Texture
Open Source and free
Those are the wishes now I'm turning to you to ask do you know what lib can match most of this points.
Thanks.
Could do a lot worse than AGG. May require some configuration of course, for your specific needs. Not sure about shadows (you can do those yourself quite easily anyway).
I'm trying to develop a custom set of libraries for creating GUIs in Linux, with, you know, widgets, buttons, etc. So I'm now learning to creating user interfaces using X11 and its Xlib. I get to the point of having a nice window of a size specified, at a position specified, of a specified background color, and the possibility of drawing points, rectangles, arcs. However as I drew my first circle I got really disappointed by the fact that the circle is not antialiased. I can see every single pixel as a square.
Now the question is easy. Is there any way to tell X: please antialias anything before drawing? Or do I have to avoid using XDrawArc and use a custom function which calls XDrawPoint for each point of the circle? Or there is a third solution?
Thanks in advance.
The short answer is "no". Xlib doesn't do anti-aliasing.
The longer answer is "you can use a higher level API such as Cairo Graphics". It's not necessary to roll your own.
What you encountered are the limitations of the X11 core protocol; technically it would be perfectly possible to add antialiasing to it, but that didn't happen.
Instead there's the XRender extension, that provides nice antialiased primitives. You'll also want to look into Xft to render antialiased text using vector fonts.
You can roll your own antialiasing algorithm. You have the only 2 primitives you need: 1) a function to draw TrueColor points (namely, xcb_poly_point(), if you're using XCB), and 2) for loops.
I plan on making a game (in SDL) where, if one character moves, the part of the image it was on turns alpha, thus allowing me to place a scrolling image underneath the original scene.
1) Is this possible?
2) If yes to #1, how can I go about implementing this (not to give me code, but to guide me in the right direction).
It sounds like you want to learn about image compositing.
A typical game these days will have a redraw function somewhere to redraw the entire screen. The entire scene is always redrawn each frame.
void redraw()
{
drawBackground();
drawCharacters();
drawHUD();
swapBuffers();
}
This is as simple as it gets: by using the right blending modes, each time you draw something it appears on top of what was drawn before. Older games are much more complicated because they don't redraw the entire screen at a time (or don't use a framebuffer), and newer games are much more complicated because they draw the world front-to-back and back-to-front in multiple passes for different types of objects.
SDL has software image compositing functions which you can use, or you can use OpenGL (which may use a combination of software and hardware). I personally use OpenGL because it is more powerful (lets you draw more complicated scenes), but the SDL compositing functions are easier to use. There are many excellent tutorials and many more mediocre or terrible tutorials online.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "the part of the image it was on turns alpha". The alpha channel does not appear on screen, you cannot see it, it just affects how two images are composited.
If we want to make an application like MS Paint, should we use OpenGL for render graphics?
I want to mention about performance if using traditional GDI vs. OpenGL.
And if there are exist some better libs for this purpose, please see me one.
GDI, X11, OpenGL... are rendering APIs, i.e. you usually don't use them for image manipulation (you can do this, but it requires some precautions).
In a drawing application like MS Paint, if it's pixel based, you'll normally manipulate some picture buffer with customary code, or a special image manipulation library, then send the full buffer to the rendering API.
If your data model consists of strokes and individual shapes, i.e. vector graphics, then OpenGL makes a quite good backend. However it may be worth looking into some other API for vector graphics, like OpenVG (which in its current implementations sits on top of OpenGL, but native implementations operating directly on the GPU may come).
In your usage scenario you'll not run into any performance problems on current computers, so don't choose your API from that criteria. OpenGL is definitely faster than GDI when it comes to texturing, alpha blending, etc. However depending on system and GPU pure GDI may outperform OpenGL for so simple things like drawing an arc or filling a complex self intersecting polygon with complex winding rules.
There is no good reason not to use OpenGL for this. Except maybe if you have years of experience with GDI but don't know a single thing about OpenGL.
On the other hand, OpenGL may very well be superior in many cases. Compositing layers or adjusting hue/saturation/brightness/contrast in a GLSL shader will be several orders of magnitude faster (in fact, pretty much "instantly") if there is a reasonably new card in the computer. Stroking a freedraw path with a "fuzzy" pen (i.e. blending a sprite with alpha transparency over and over again) will be orders of magnitude faster. On images with somewhat reasonable dimensions, most filter kernels should run close to realtime. Rescaling with bilinear filtering runs in hardware.
Such things won't matter on a 512x512 image, as pretty much everything is instantaneous at such resolutions, but on a typical 4096x3072 (or larger) image from your digital camera, it may be very noticeable, especially if you have 4-6 layers.
I just started with OpenGL programming and I am building a clock application. I want it to look something simple like this: http://i.stack.imgur.com/E73ap.jpg
However, my application looks very "un-anti-aliased" : http://i.stack.imgur.com/LUx2v.png
I tried the GL_SMOOTH_POLYGON method mentioned in the Red Book. However that doesn't seem to do a thing.
I am working on a laptop with Intel integrated graphics. The card doesn't support things like GL_ARB_multisample.
What are my options at this point to my app look anti-aliased?
Intel integrated videocards are notorious for their lack of support for OpenGL antialiasing. You can work around that, however.
First option: Manual supersampling
Make a texture 2x times as big as the screen. Render your scene to the texture via FBO, then render the texture at half size so it fills the screen, with bilinear interpolation. Can be very slow (in complex scenes) due to the 4x increase in pixels to draw.
Will result in weak antialiasing (so I don't recommend it for desktop software like your clock). See for yourself:
Second option: (advanced)
Use a shader to perform Morphological Antialiasing. This is a new technique and I don't know how easy it is to implement. It's used by some advanced games.
Third option:
Use textures and bilinear interpolation to your advantage by emulating OpenGL's primitives via textures. The technique is described here.
Fourth option:
Use a separate texture for every element of your clock.
For example, for your hour-arrow, don't use a flat black GL_POLYGON shaped like your arrow. Instead, use a rotated GL_QUAD, textured with a hour-arrow image drawn in an image program. Then bilinear interpolation will take care of antialiasing it as you rotate it.
This option would take the least effort and looks very well.
Fifth option:
Use a library that supports software rendering -
Qt
Cairo
Windows GDI+
WPF
XRender
etc
Such libraries contain their own algorithms for antialiased rendering, so they don't depend on your videocard for antialiasing. The advantages are:
Will render the same on every platform. (this is not guaranteed with OpenGL in various cases - for example, the thick diagonal "tick" lines in your screenshot are rendered as parallelograms, rather than rectangles)
Has a big bunch of convenient drawing functions ("drawArc", "drawText", "drawConcavePolygon", and those will support gradients and borders. also you get things like an Image class.)
Some, like Qt, will provide much more desktop-app type functionality. This can be very useful even for a clock app. For example:
in an OpenGL app you'd probably loop every 20msec and re-render the clock, and not even think twice. This would hog unnecessary CPU cycles, and wake up the CPU on a laptop, depleting the battery. By contrast, Qt is very intelligent about when it must redraw parts of your clock (e.g., when the right half of the clock stops being covered by a window, or when your clock moves the minute-arrow one step).
once you get to implementing, e.g. a tray icon, or a settings dialog, for your clock, a library like Qt can make it a snap. It's nice to use the same library for everything.
The disadvantage is much worse performance, but that doesn't matter at all for a clock app, and it turns around when you take into account the intelligent-redrawing functionality I mentioned.
For something like a clock app, the fifth option is very much recommended. OpenGL is mainly useful for games, 3D software and intense graphical stuff like music visualizers. For desktop apps, it's too low-level and the implementations differ too much.
Draw it into a framebuffer object at twice (or more) the final resolution and then use that image as a texture for a single quad drawn in the actual window.