I'm currently working on a cylinder shaped terrain produced by a height map.
What happens in the program is simple, there is a texture for the colors of the terrain that has the alpha value of regions in with i want it to be invisible and another texture ARGB with the A being the gray scale for the heights and RGB is the normal for the light.
The texture is such that the A value goes from 1 to 255 and I'm reserving the 0 for the regions with holes, meaning i don't want then to exist.
So in theory no problem, I'm making those regions invisible based on the first texture but on practice what's happening is that the program is considering the 0 as the minimum height and, even with the texture on top, is creating some lines towards this regions of 0, like trying to make its triangle but not getting there because i cut the next vertex by making it invisible.
Notice the lines going to the center of the cylinder
This is how it gets when i stop making those vertex invisible
So, just to say, i used the function Clip() on the pixel shader to make it invisible.
Basically what i need of help:
Is it possible, the same way i use clip() on the pixel shader i do something like that on the vertex shader and get rid of the unwanted vertex?
Basically, is possible to just say to ignore value 0?
Any ideas to fix this? i thinking of making all the vertex that are 0 become the value of his neighbor, that way those lines wouldn't go to the center but to the same plane as the cylinder itself.
Another thing is that we can see that the program is interpolating the values from one vertex to the next, that is why i cuts on halfway through to the invisible vertex
I'm working with Directx11 API with C++ and the program uses Tessellation.
Thank you for your time and will be very glad with any input on this!
Well i did resolve a bit of this issue.
I made the texture with the height values pass through a modifier that created another texture with the zero values substituted by the side pixel with value different then zero or change for 128.0f.
with that it made the weird lines direction be more accurate not going to the center of the cylinder but along the line.
Related
I am currently drawing a grid using a series of triangle strips. I am using this to render a height field, and generating the vertex data completely in the vertex shader without any input buffers just using the vertex and instance indexes. This is all working fine and is very efficient.
However, I now find myself also needing to implement border lines on this grid. The obvious solution here would be something like marching squares. Basically, what I want to achieve is something like this:
The black dots represent the vertices in the grid that are part of some set, and I want to shade the area inside the red line differently than that outside it.
Naïvely, this seems like it would be easy: Add a value to the vertices that is 1 for vertices in the set and 0 for those outside it, and render differently depending on if the interpolated value is above or below 0.5, for instance.
However, because this is rendered as a triangle strip, this does not quite work. In pracitce, since this is rendered as a triangle strip, this ends up looking like this:
So, half the edges work and half end up with ugly square staircases.
I've now been trying to wrack my brain for days whether there is some trick that could be used to generate the vertex values differently or making a more complicated test than >0.5 to get closer to the intended shape without giving up on the nice and simple triangle strips and having to actually generate geometry ahead of time, but I can not think of one.
Has anyone ever dealt with a similar problem? Is there some clever solution I am missing?
I am doing this in Metal, but I don't expect this to depend much on the specific API used.
It sounds like you're trying to calculate the colors in the fragment shader independently of the mesh underneath. If so, you should decouple the color calculation from the mesh.
Assuming your occupancy is stored in a texture, use textureGather to get the four nearby occupancy values; determine the equation of the boundary; then use the fractional part of the texture coordinates to determine its position relative to the boundary. (The devil here is in the details -- in particularly the ambiguous checker-board pattern case.)
Once you implement the above approach, it's very likely you won't even need the triangle strip mesh anymore -- simply fill your entire drawing area with a single large quad and let the fragment shader to do the rest.
There are a great number of questions relating to exactly two points in texture coordinates, and my shader already works with that concept. 1.0, 1.0 shows the entire image, and 1.0 / frame in one dimension or another displays the appearance of... well, unfortunately, it displays everything between 0.0 of the quad, to the decimal value of the division of the frame.
What I'd like to do is, from the shader, control all four points of the texture coordinates. In every tutorial and every sample, the texture coordinate vec is always a vec2, implying that you only have control over the two end-points, and not the starting points. Is there a way to eliminate this limitation?
To give you an idea of why I want to do this (If it isn't blatantly obvious already), I'd like to pick a tile or animated frame out of a larger sheet.
Ideally, I'd also be able to find the dimensions (Width and height) of the image in the shader, but if necessary, it isn't that difficult to pass those values in. I believe at this time I'm using GLSL 2, meaning I'm unable to use the textureSize2D function in the shader (Already tried it).
Simplifying things UV coodrinate pair you pass to texture command means a point to read from texture. just one point, not an area. Depending on sampler state and whether minification/magnification occur or not more then one texel can be used to calculate value of that point, but still it is one value connected to UV provided.
I'd like to render a vectorfield visualization with OpenGL. Right now, I have a 3D cube filled with points which I need to replace with arrows. I've read a lot about Point Sprites in OpenGL and they seem to fit my needs pretty good.
I haven't really worked with textures yet, so there are some questions regarding the use of them together with Point Sprites:
First of all, is it possible to easily replace my points with arrows by just using a texture? If so, is it possible to rotate or scale those point sprites by an arbitrary degree using shaders?
If there are other possibilites than point sprites for achieving this, it would also be great to hear about them. I'm using OpenGL 4.2.
Point sprites are always screen-aligned squares. And they have an implementation-dependent maximum size.
If you need to do something like this, you should use a Geometry Shader that takes points as inputs, and outputs a quad (as 4 vertices of a triangle strip). Then you can do whatever you want.
Note that you should try to pass as little information as you can get away with out of the GS. Ideally, for maximum performance, you should only output to gl_Position and to a vec2 indicating where in the quad a particular location is.
is it possible to ... scale those point sprites by an arbitrary degree using shaders?
No, point sprites have an implementation-defined upper limit on size.
So I'm rendering this diagram each frame:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/44766482/diagramm.png
Basically, each second it moves everything one pixel to the left and every frame it updates the rightmost pixel column with current data. So a lot of changes are made.
It is completely constructed from GL_LINES, always from bottom to top.
However those black missing columns are not intentional at all, it's just the rasterizer not picking them up.
I'm using integers for positions and bytes for colors, the projection matrix is exactly 1:1; translating by 1 means moving 1 pixel. Orthogonal.
So my problem is, how to get rid of the black lines? I suppose I could write the data to texture, but that seems expensive. Currently I use a VBO.
Render you columns as quads instead with a width of 1 pixel, the rasterization rules of OpenGL will make sure you have no holes this way.
Realize the question is already closed, but you can also get the effect you want by drawing your lines centered at 0.5. A pixel's CENTER is at 0.5, and drawing a line there will always be picked up by the rasterizer in the right place.
http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/3508/texturefailz.png
This is my current program. I know it's terribly ugly, I found two random textures online ('lava' and 'paper') which don't even seem to tile. That's not the problem at the moment.
I'm trying to figure out the first steps of an RPG. This is a top-down screenshot of a 10x10 heightmap (currently set to all 0s, so it's just a plane), and I texture it by making one pass per texture per quad, and each vertex has alpha values for each texture so that they blend with OpenGL.
The problem is that, notice how the textures trend along diagonals, and even though I'm drawing with GL_QUAD, this is presumably because the quads are turned into sets of two triangles and then the alpha values at the corners have more weight along the hypotenuses... But I wasn't expecting that to matter at all. By drawing quads, I was hoping that even though they were split into triangles at some low level, the vertex alphas would cause the texture to radiate in a circular outward gradient from the vertices.
How can I fix this to make it look better? Do I need to scrap this and try a whole different approach? IS there a different approach for something like this? I'd love to hear alternatives as well.
Feel free to ask questions and I'll be here refreshing until I get a valid answer, so I'll comment as fast as I can.
Thanks!!
EDIT:
Here is the kind of thing I'd like to achieve. No I'm obviously not one of the billions of noobs out there "trying to make a MMORPG", I'm using it as an example because it's very much like what I want:
http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/5725/runescapehowdotheytile.png
How do you think this is done? Part of it must be vertex alphas like I'm doing because of the smooth gradients... But maybe they have a list of different triangle configurations within a tile, and each tile stores which configuration it uses? So for example, configuration 1 is a triangle in the topleft and one in the bottomright, 2 is the topright and bottomleft, 3 is a quad on the top and a quad on the bottom, etc? Can you think of any other way I'm missing, or if you've got it all figured out then please share how they do it!
The diagonal artefacts are caused by having all of your quads split into triangles along the same diagonal. You define points [0,1,2,3] for your quad. Each quad is split into triangles [0,1,2] and [1,2,3]. Try drawing with GL_TRIANGLES and alternating your choice of diagonal. There are probably more efficient ways of doing this using GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP or GL_QUAD_STRIP.
i think you are doing it right, but you should increase the resolution of your heightmap a lot to get finer tesselation!
for example look at this heightmap renderer:
mdterrain
it shows the same artifacts at low resolution but gets better if you increase the iterations
I've never done this myself, but I've read several guides (which I can't find right now) and it seems pretty straight-forward and can even be optimized by using shaders.
Create a master texture to control the mixing of 4 sub-textures. Use the r,g,b,a components of the master texture as a percentage mix of each subtextures ( lava, paper, etc, etc). You can easily paint a master texture using paint.net, photostop, gimp and just paint into each color channel. You can compute the resulting texture before hand using all 5 textures OR you can calculate the result on the fly with a fragment shader. I don't have a good example of either, but I think you can figure it out given how far you've come.
The end result will be "pixel" pefect blending (depends on the textures resolution and filtering) and will avoid the vertex blending issues.