I want to rotate an object in OpenGL without drawing again, to save time.
In the init method i want to draw the picture and then only rotate it according to mouse events.
Here is the full method:
gl.Clear(OpenGL.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | OpenGL.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
gl.LoadIdentity();
gl.Rotate(camera_angle_v, 1.0f, 0.0, 0.0);
gl.Begin(OpenGL.GL_POINTS);
//Draw
gl.End();
OpenGL doesn't work this way fundamentally. The frame you're rendering in is essentially a 2d array of pixels. When you draw an image, it changes the values of some of those pixels to create the image for you. Once something's been drawn, it will stay there until you clear it. OpenGL doesn't keep track of what you rendered in the past (except for the pixels it fills in the frame), so it can't do any transformations on anything but the triangle/line it's currently rendering.
At the beginning of your draw method, you clear the frame (reset all the pixels to the clear color). You have to redraw the object after that. It's how OpenGL works and it's very fast at it. On a modern GPU, you can draw millions of triangles each frame and still maintain 60fps. If you don't clear the frame at the beginning, the image will be drawn on top of the old frame and you'll get a hall-of-mirrors sort of effect.
If performance is an issue, consider learning more modern OpenGL. What you're using right now is immediate mode OpenGL, which was part of the OpenGL 1.0 specification back in 1992. In 1997, OpenGL 1.1 introduced vertex arrays, which provides a significant speed boost for large amounts of vertices since there's only one method call for all the vertices instead of one method call per vertex. And with each new version of OpenGL comes more optimized ways of drawing.
You have to draw the object again - that's how OpenGL works.
Each frame gets rendered from scratch based on the current scene geometry.
Well... If you're using immediate mode, I guess you can use display lists and call glRotate accordingly. Though as Robert Rouhani said, the technique you're using is ancient (And what 99% of online tutorials teach you). Use VAO (or even better, VBO) to draw the object.
Related
I've been learning a bit of OpenGL lately, and I just got to the Framebuffers.
So by my current understanding, if you have a framebuffer of your own, and you want to draw the color buffer onto the window, you'll need to first draw a quad, and then wrap the texture over it? Is that right? Or is there something like glDrawArrays(), glDrawElements() version for framebuffers?
It seems a bit... Odd (clunky? Hackish?) to me that you have to wrap a texture over a quad in order to draw the framebuffer. This doesn't have to be done with the default framebuffer. Or is that done behind your back?
Well. The main point of framebuffer objects is to render scenes to buffers that will not get displayed but rather reused somewhere, as a source of data for some other operation (shadow maps, High dynamic range processing, reflections, portals...).
If you want to display it, why do you use a custom framebuffer in the first place?
Now, as #CoffeeandCode comments, there is indeed a glBlitFramebuffer call to allow transfering pixels from one framebuffer to another. But before you go ahead and use that call, ask yourself why you need that extra step. It's not a free operation...
I've implemented Game of Life using OpenGL buffers (as specified here: http://www.glprogramming.com/red/chapter14.html#name20). In this implementation each pixel is a cell in the game.
My program receives the initial state of the game (2d array). The size array ,in my implementation, is the size of the window. This of course makes it "unplayable" if the array is 5x5 or some other small values.
At each iteration I'm reading the content of the framebuffer into a 2D array (its size is the window size):
glReadPixels(0, 0, win_x, win_y, GL_RGB, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, image);
Then, I'm doing the necessary steps to calculate the living and dead cells, and then draw a rectangle which covers the whole window, using:
glRectf(0, 0, win_x, win_y);
I want to zoom (or enlarge) the window without affecting the correctness of my code. If I resize the window, then the framebuffer content won't fit inside image(the array). Is there a way of zooming the window(so that each pixel be drawn as several pixels) without affecting the framebuffer?
First, you seem to be learning opengl 2, I would suggest instead learning a newer version, as it is more powerful and efficient. A good tutorial can be found here http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/
If i understand this correctly, you read in an initial state and draw it, then continuously read in the pixels on the screen, update the array based on the game of life logic then draw it back? this seems overly complicated.
The reading of the pixels on the screen is unnecessary, and will cause complications if you try to enlarge the rects to more than a pixel.
I would say a good solution would be to keep a bit array (1 is a organism, 0 is not), possibly as a 2d array in memory, updating the logic every say 30 iterations (for 30 fps), then drawing all the rects to the screen, black for 1, white for 0 using glColor(r,g,b,a) tied to an in statement in a nested for loop.
Then, if you give your rects a negative z coord, you can "zoom in" using glTranslate(x,y,z) triggered by a keyboard button.
Of course in a newer version of opengl, vertex buffers would make the code much cleaner and efficient.
You can't store your game state directly the window framebuffer and then resize it for rendering, since what is stored in the framebuffer is by definition what is about to be rendered. (You could overwrite it, but then you lose your game state...) The simplest solution would just to store the game state in an array (on the client side) and then update a texture based on that. Thus for each block that was set, you could set a pixel in a texture to be the appropriate color. Each frame, you then render a full screen quad with that texture (with GL_NEAREST filtering).
However, if you want to take advantage of your GPU there are some tricks that could massively speed up the simulation by using a fragment shader to generate the texture. In this case you would actually have two textures that you ping-pong between: one containing the current game state, and the other containing the next game state. Each frame you would use your fragment shader (along with a FBO) to generate the next state texture from the current state texture. Afterwards, the two textures are swapped, making the next state become the current state. The current state texture would then be rendered to the screen the same way as above.
I tried to give an overview of how you might be able to offload the computation onto the GPU, but if I was unclear anywhere just ask! For a more detailed explanation feel free to ask another question.
I'm just starting OpenGL programming in Win32 C++ so don't be too hard on me :) I've been wandering along the NeHe tutorials and 'the red book' a bit now, but I'm confused. So far I've been able to set up an OpenGL window, draw some triangles etc, no problem. But now I want to build a model and view it from different angles. So do we:
Load a model into memory (saving triangles/quads coordinates in structs on the heap) and in each scene render we draw all stuff we have to the screen using glVertex3f and so on.
Load/draw the model once using glVertex3f etc and we can just change the viewing position in each scene.
Other...?
It seems to me option 1 is most plausible from all I read so far, however it seems a bit ehh.. dumb! Do we have to decide which objects are visible, and only draw those. Isn't that very slow? Option 2 might seem more attractive :)
EDIT: Thanks for all the help, I've decided to do: read my model from file, then load it into the GPU memory using glBufferData and then feed that data to the render function using glVertexPointer and glDrawArrays.
First you need to understand, that OpenGL actually doesn't understand the term "model", all what OpenGL sees is a stream of vertices coming in and depending on the current mode it uses those streams of vertices to draw triangles to the screen.
Every frame drawing iteration follows some outline like this:
clear all buffers
for each window element (main scene, HUD, minimap, etc.):
set scissor and viewport
conditionally clear depth and/or stencil
set projection matrix
set modelview matrix for initial view
for each model
apply model transformation onto matrix stack
bind model data (textures, vertices, etc.)
issue model drawing commands
swap buffers
OpenGL does not remember what's happening up there. There was (is) some facility, called Display Lists but they are not able to store all kinds of commands – also they got deprecated and removed from recent OpenGL versions. The immediate mode commands glBegin, glEnd, glVertex, glNormal and glTexCoord have been removed as well.
So the idea is to upload some data (textures, vertex arrays, etc.) into OpenGL buffer objects. However only textures are directly understood by OpenGL as what they are (images). All other kinds of buffers require you telling OpenGL how to deal with them. This is done by calls to gl{Vertex,Color,TexCoord,Normal,Attrib}Pointer to set data access parameters and glDraw{Arrays,Elements} to trigger OpenGL fetching a stream of vertices to be fed to the rasterizer.
You should upload the data to the GPU memory once, and then draw each frame using as few commands as possible.
Previously, this was done using display lists. Nowadays, it's all about vertex buffer objects (a.k.a. VBOs), so look into those.
Here's a tutorial about VBOs, written before they were only an extension, and not a core part of OpenGL.
I'm writing a Minecraft like static 3d block world in C++ / openGL. I'm working at improving framerates, and so far I've implemented frustum culling using an octree. This helps, but I'm still seeing moderate to bad frame rates. The next step would be to cull cubes that are hidden from the viewpoint by closer cubes. However I haven't been able to find many resources on how to accomplish this.
Create a render target with a Z-buffer (or "depth buffer") enabled. Then make sure to sort all your opaque objects so they are rendered front to back, i.e. the ones closest to the camera first. Anything using alpha blending still needs to be rendered back to front, AFTER you rendered all your opaque objects.
Another technique is occlusion culling: You can cheaply "dry-render" your geometry and then find out how many pixels failed the depth test. There is occlusion query support in DirectX and OpenGL, although not every GPU can do it.
The downside is that you need a delay between the rendering and fetching the result - depending on the setup (like when using predicated tiling), it may be a full frame. That means that you need to be creative there, like rendering a bounding box that is bigger than the object itself, and dismissing the results after a camera cut.
And one more thing: A more traditional solution (that you can use concurrently with occlusion culling) is a room/portal system, where you define regions as "rooms", connected via "portals". If a portal is not visible from your current room, you can't see the room connected to it. And even it is, you can click your viewport to what's visible through the portal.
The approach I took in this minecraft level renderer is essentially a frustum-limited flood fill. The 16x16x128 chunks are split into 16x16x16 chunklets, each with a VBO with the relevant geometry. I start a floodfill in the chunklet grid at the player's location to find chunklets to render. The fill is limited by:
The view frustum
Solid chunklets - if the entire side of a chunklet is opaque blocks, then the floodfill will not enter the chunklet in that direction
Direction - the flood will not reverse direction, e.g.: if the current chunklet is to the north of the starting chunklet, do not flood into the chunklet to the south
It seems to work OK. I'm on android, so while a more complex analysis (antiportals as noted by Mike Daniels) would cull more geometry, I'm already CPU-limited so there's not much point.
I've just seen your answer to Alan: culling is not your problem - it's what and how you're sending to OpenGL that is slow.
What to draw: don't render a cube for each block, render the faces of transparent blocks that border an opaque block. Consider a 3x3x3 cube of, say, stone blocks: There is no point drawing the center block because there is no way that the player can see it. Likewise, the player will never see the faces between two adjacent stone blocks, so don't draw them.
How to draw: As noted by Alan, use VBOs to batch geometry. You will not believe how much faster they make things.
An easier approach, with minimal changes to your existing code, would be to use display lists. This is what minecraft uses.
How many blocks are you rendering and on what hardware? Modern hardware is very fast and is very difficult to overwhelm with geometry (unless we're talking about a handheld platform). On any moderately recent desktop hardware you should be able to render hundreds of thousands of cubes per frame at 60 frames per second without any fancy culling tricks.
If you're drawing each block with a separate draw call (glDrawElements/Arrays, glBegin/glEnd, etc) (bonus points: don't use glBegin/glEnd) then that will be your bottleneck. This is a common pitfall for beginners. If you're doing this, then you need to batch together all triangles that share texture and shading parameters into a single call for each setup. If the geometry is static and doesn't change frame to frame, you want to use one Vertex Buffer Object for each batch of triangles.
This can still be combined with frustum culling with an octree if you typically only have a small portion of your total game world in the view frustum at one time. The vertex buffers are still loaded statically and not changed. Frustum cull the octree to generate only the index buffers for the triangles in the frustum and upload those dynamically each frame.
If you have surfaces close to the camera, you can create a frustum which represents an area that is not visible, and cull objects that are entirely contained in that frustum. In the diagram below, C is the camera, | is a flat surface near the camera, and the frustum-shaped region composed of . represents the occluded area. The surface is called an antiportal.
.
..
...
....
|....
|....
|....
|....
C |....
|....
|....
|....
....
...
..
.
(You should of course also turn on depth testing and depth writing as mentioned in other answer and comments -- it's very simple to do in OpenGL.)
The use of a Z-Buffer ensures that polygons overlap correctly.
Enabling the depth test makes every drawing operation check the Z-buffer before placing pixels onto the screen.
If you have convex objects you must (for performance) enable backface culling!
Example code:
glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE);
glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);
glDepthMask(GL_TRUE);
You can change the behaviour of glCullFace() passing GL_FRONT or GL_BACK...
glCullFace(...);
// Draw the "game world"...
Now that my OpenGL application is getting larger and more complex, I am noticing that it's also getting a little slow on very low-end systems such as Netbooks. In Java, I am able to get around this by drawing to a BufferedImage then drawing that to the screen and updating the cached render every one in a while. How would I go about doing this in OpenGL with C++?
I found a few guides but they seem to only work on newer hardware/specific Nvidia cards. Since the cached rendering operations will only be updated every once in a while, i can sacrifice speed for compatability.
glBegin(GL_QUADS);
setColor(DARK_BLUE);
glVertex2f(0, 0); //TL
glVertex2f(appWidth, 0); //TR
setColor(LIGHT_BLUE);
glVertex2f(appWidth, appHeight); //BR
glVertex2f(0, appHeight); //BR
glEnd();
This is something that I am especially concerned about. A gradient that takes up the entire screen is being re-drawn many times per second. How can I cache it to a texture then just draw that texture to increase performance?
Also, a trick I use in Java is to render it to a 1 X height texture then scale that to width x height to increase the performance and lower memory usage. Is there such a trick with openGL?
If you don't want to use Framebuffer Objects for compatibility reasons (but they are pretty widely available), you don't want to use the legacy (and non portable) Pbuffers either. That leaves you with the simple possibility of reading the contents of the framebuffer with glReadPixels and creating a new texture with that data using glTexImage2D.
Let me add that I don't really think that in your case you are going to gain much. Drawing a texture onscreen requires at least texel access per pixel, that's not really a huge saving if the alternative is just interpolating a color as you are doing now!
I sincerely doubt drawing from a texture is less work than drawing a gradient.
In drawing a gradient:
Color is interpolated at every pixel
In drawing a texture:
Texture coordinate is interpolated at every pixel
Color is still interpolated at every pixel
Texture lookup for every pixel
Multiply lookup color with current color
Not that either of these are slow, but drawing untextured polygons is pretty much as fast as it gets.
Hey there, thought I'd give you some insight in to this.
There's essentially two ways to do it.
Frame Buffer Objects (FBOs) for more modern hardware, and the back buffer for a fall back.
The article from one of the previous posters is a good article to follow on it, and there's plent of tutorials on google for FBOs.
In my 2d Engine (Phoenix), we decided we would go with just the back buffer method. Our class was fairly simple and you can view the header and source here:
http://code.google.com/p/phoenixgl/source/browse/branches/0.3/libPhoenixGL/PhRenderTexture.h
http://code.google.com/p/phoenixgl/source/browse/branches/0.3/libPhoenixGL/PhRenderTexture.cpp
Hope that helps!
Consider using a display list rather than a texture. Texture reads (especially for large ones) are a good deal slower than 8 or 9 function calls.
Before doing any optimization you should make sure you fully understand the bottlenecks. You'll probably be surprised at the result.
Look into FBOs - framebuffer objects. It's an extension that lets you render to arbitrary rendertargets, including textures. This extension should be available on most recent hardware. This is a fairly good primer on FBOs: OpenGL Frame Buffer Object 101