I am trying to write a program that writes video camera frames into a quad.
I saw tutorials explaining that with framebuffers can be faster, but still learning how to do it.
But then besides the framebuffer, I found that there is also renderbuffers.
The question is, if the purpose is only to write a texture into a quad that will fill up the screen, do I really need a renderbuffer?
I understand that renderbuffers are for depth testing, which I think is only for checking Z position of the pixel, therefore would be silly to have to create a render buffer for my scenario, correct?
A framebuffer object is a place to stick images so that you can render to them. Color buffers, depth buffers, etc all go into a framebuffer object.
A renderbuffer is like a texture, but with two important differences:
It is always 2D and has no mipmaps. So it's always exactly 1 image.
You cannot read from a renderbuffer. You can attach them to an FBO and render to them, but you can't sample from them with a texture access or something.
So you're talking about two mostly separate concepts. Renderbuffers do not have to be "for depth testing." That is a common use case for renderbuffers, because if you're rendering the colors to a texture, you usually don't care about the depth. You need a depth because you need depth testing for hidden-surface removal. But you don't need to sample from that depth. So instead of making a depth texture, you make a depth renderbuffer.
But renderbuffers can also use colors rather than depth formats. You just can't attach them as textures. You can still blit from/to them, and you can still read them back with glReadPixels. You just can't read from them in a shader.
Oddly enough, this does nothing to answer your question:
The question is, if the purpose is only to write a texture into a quad that will fill up the screen, do I really need a renderbuffer?
I don't see why you need a framebuffer or a renderbuffer of any kind. A texture is a texture; just draw a textured quad.
Related
glFramebufferTexture allows one to bind an entire cubemap as a color attachment for layered rendering. In turn, glReadBuffer then allows one to bind said entire cubemap as a read buffer.
I want to render a scene to the non-zero mip levels of a cubemap texture. I'm using layered rendering to render not to one face, but to the entire thing in one go. However, the shader used for this uses the 0th mip level of that same texture. Since I don't think I can expose the texture to a shader and to a framebuffer attachment at the same time, I'm rendering to a different texture and copying the contents of that texture to my original texture's desired mip level.
Right now I'm doing this with a pass-through shader, which is pretty slow since it's layered rendering thus uses a geometry shader, and it would be better to use an API function. However, glCopyTexSubImage2D only allows cubemap faces, and neither it nor glCopyTexSubImage3D seem to accept cubemaps as input. Apart from 4.5-specific functions such as glCopyTextureSubImage3D, is there any way to retrieve an entire cubemap from the framebuffer into a cubemap texture ? I'm also aware that glCopyImageSubData exists, but something at the feature level of glFramebufferTexture is preferrable (so 3.2).
In order to implement "depth-peeling", I render my OpenGL scene in to a series of framebuffers each equipped with a rgba color texture and depth texture. This works fine if I don't care about anti-aliasing. If I do, then it seems the correct thing to do is enable GL_MULTISAMPLING and use a GL_TEXTURE_2D_MULTISAMPLE instead of GL_TEXTURE_2D. But I'm confused about which other calls need to be replaced.
In particular, how should I adapt my framebuffer construction to use glTexImage2DMultisample instead of glTexImage2D?
Do I need to change the calls to glFramebufferTexture2D beyond using GL_TEXTURE_2D_MULTISAMPLE instead of GL_TEXTURE_2D?
If I'm rendering both color and depth into textures, do I need to make a call to glRenderbufferStorageMultisample?
Finally, is there some glBlit* that I need to do in addition to setting up textures for the framebuffer to render into?
There are many related questions on this topic, but none of the solutions I found seem to point to a canonical tutorial or clear example putting all these together.
While I have only used multisampled FBO rendering with renderbuffers, not textures, the following is my understanding.
Do I need to change the calls to glFramebufferTexture2D beyond using GL_TEXTURE_2D_MULTISAMPLE instead of GL_TEXTURE_2D?
No, that's all you need. You create the texture with glTexImage2DMultisample(), and then attach it using GL_TEXTURE_2D_MULTISAMPLE as the 3rd argument to glFramebufferTexture2D(). The only constraint is that the level (5th argument) has to be 0.
If I'm rendering both color and depth into textures, do I need to make a call to glRenderbufferStorageMultisample?
Yes. If you attach a depth buffer to the same FBO, you need to use a multisampled renderbuffer, with the same number of samples as the color buffer. So you create your depth renderbuffer with glRenderbufferStorageMultisample(), passing in the same sample count you used for the color buffer.
Finally, is there some glBlit* that I need to do in addition to setting up textures for the framebuffer to render into?
Not for rendering into the framebuffer. Once you're done rendering, you have a couple of options:
You can downsample (resolve) the multisample texture to a regular texture, and then use the regular texture for your subsequent rendering. For resolving the multisample texture, you can use glBlitFramebuffer(), where the multisample texture is attached to the GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, and the regular texture to the GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER.
You can use the multisample texture for your subsequent rendering. You will need to use the sampler2DMS type for the samplers in your shader code, with the corresponding sampling functions.
For option 1, I don't really see a good reason to use a multisample texture. You might just as well use a multisample renderbuffer, which is slightly easier to use, and should be at least as efficient. For this, you create a renderbuffer for the color attachment, and allocate it with glRenderbufferStorageMultisample(), very much like what you need for the depth buffer.
I succeeded in render to texture with Texturebuffer, using VAO and shaders.
But FBO has another options for color buffer, it's Renderbuffer. I searched a lot on the internet, but cannot found any example related to draw Renderbuffer as Texturebuffer with shaders
If I ain't wrong, Renderbuffer is released in OpenGL 3.30, and it's faster than Texturebuffer.
Can I use Renderbuffer as Texturebuffer? (stupid question huh? I think it should be absolutely, isn't it?)
If yes, please lead me or give any example to draw render buffer as texture buffer.
My target is just for study, but I'd like to know is that a better way to draw textures? Should we use it frequently?
First of all, don't use the term "texture buffer" when you really just mean texture. A "buffer texture"/"texture buffer object" is a different conecpt, completely unrelated here.
If I ain't wrong, Renderbuffer is released in OpenGL 3.30, and it's faster than Texturebuffer.
No. Renderbuffers were there when FBOs were first invented. One being faster than the other is not generally true either, but these are implementation details. But it is also irrelevant.
Can I use Renderbuffer as Texturebuffer? (stupid question huh? I think it should be absolutely, isn't it?)
Nope. You cant use the contents of a renderbuffer directly as a source for texture mapping. Renderbuffesr are just abstract memory regions the GPU renders to, and they are not in the format required for texturing. You can read back the results to the CPU using glReadPixels, our you could copy the data into a texture object, e.g. via glCopyTexSubImage - but that would be much slower than directly rendering into textures.
So renderbuffers are good for a different set of use cases:
offscreen rendering (e.g. where the image results will be written to a file, or encoded to a video)
as helper buffers during rendering, like the depth buffer or stencil buffer, where you do not care anbout the final contents of these buffers anyway
as intermediate buffer when the image data can't be directly used by the follwoing steps, e.g. when using multisampling, and copying the result to a non-multisampled framebuffer or texture
It appears that you have your terminology mixed up.
You attach images to Framebuffer Objects. Those images can either be a Renderbuffer Object (this is an offscreen surface that has very few uses besides attaching and blitting) or they can be part of a Texture Object.
Use whichever makes sense. If you need to read the results of your drawing in a shader then obviously you should attach a texture. If you just need a depth buffer, but never need to read it back, a renderbuffer might be fine. Some older hardware does not support multisampled textures, so that is another situation where you might favor renderbuffers over textures.
Performance wise, do not make any assumptions. You might think that since renderbuffers have a lot fewer uses they would somehow be quicker, but that's not always the case. glBlitFramebuffer (...) can be slower than drawing a textured quad.
I wanted to know if it's possible to give a non NULL texture to a frame buffer to render on it. I mean just drawing on it so it will become the background of the final texture.
From what I have tried it just keep the texture I give and render it directly, there's no drawing on it ( as if the drawing part have been useless).
If i give a NULL texture the drawing is done.
So i wanted to know if it's possible, am i just doing it wrongly?
all example of use of fbo i've seen only show NULL texture sent.
What you're trying to do is not as common as the use case where content in an FBO attachment is rendered from scratch. That's why you won't find as many examples.
It's still perfectly legal, though, and should work. The only difference should really be that you don't call glClear() after attaching the texture to the FBO, and starting to render.
One case where you'll have to be careful is if you use depth buffering for the rendering you want to do on top of the original texture content. In this case, you will of course need a depth buffer attachment (which is typically a renderbuffer) in your FBO, as usual. In this case, you will need to clear your depth buffer, but not the color buffer, before starting to render:
glClear(GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
To clarify, when I say 'default framebuffer' I mean the one provided by the windowing system and what ends up on your monitor.
To improve my rendering speeds for a CAD app, I've managed to separate out the 3D elements from the Qt-handled 2D ones, and they now each render into their own FBO. When the time comes to get them onto the screen, I blit the 3D FBO onto the default FB, and then I want to blend my 2D FBO on top of it.
I've gotten to the blitting part fine, but I can't see how to blend my 2D FBO onto it? Both FBOs are identical in size and format, and they are both the same as the default FB.
I'm sure it's a simple operation, but I can't find anything on the net - presumably I'm missing the right term for what I am trying to do. Although I'm using Qt, I can use native OpenGL commands without issue.
A blit operation is ultimately a pixel copy operation. If you want to layer one image on top of another, you can't blit it. You must instead render a full-screen quad as a texture and use the proper blending parameters for your blending operation.
You can use GL_EXT_framebuffer_blit to blit contents of the framebuffer object to the application framebuffer (or to any other). Although, as the spec states, it is not possible to use blending:
The pixel copy bypasses the fragment pipeline. The only fragment
operations which affect the blit are the pixel ownership test and
the scissor test.
So any blending means to use fragment shader as suggested. One fullscreen pass with blending should be pretty cheap, I believe there is nothing to worry about.
use shader to read back from frame buffer. this is OpenGL ES extension, not support by all hardware.
https://www.khronos.org/registry/gles/extensions/EXT/EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch.txt