WebGL render buffers receiving skewed pixel values from shader - glsl

I'm rendering a scene of polygons to multiple render targets so that I can perform postprocessing effects. However, the values I'm setting in the fragment shader don't seem to be accurately reflected in the pixel shader.
Right now the pipeline looks like this:
Render basic polygons (using simple shader, below) to an intermediate buffer
Render the buffer as a screen-sized quad to the screen.
I'm using WebGL Inspector (http://benvanik.github.com/WebGL-Inspector/) to view the intermediate buffers (created using gl.createFrameBuffer()).
I have a very simple fragment shader when drawing the polygons, something like this:
gl_FragColor = vec4(1, 0, 0, 0.5);
And this before my draw call:
gl.disable(gl.BLEND);
I would expect this to create a pixel in the buffer with a value of exactly (255,0,0,128), but in fact, it creates a pixel with the value of (255,0,0,64) -- half as much alpha as expected.
The program is fairly large and tangly, so I'll update the post with specific details if the answer isn't immediately apparent.
Thanks!

Do you have premultiplyAlpha set to true? Fiddling with that is the first thing that came to mind re: weird alpha values.

Related

GLSL : accessing framebuffer to get RGB and change it

I'd like to access framebuffer to get RGB and change their values for each pixel. It is because the glReadPixels, and glDrawPixels are too slow to use, so that i should use shaders instead of using them.
Now, I write code, and success to display three-dimensional model using GLSL shaders.
I drew two cubes as follows.
....
glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 12*6);
....
and fragment shader :
varying vec3 fragmentColor;
void main()
{
gl_FragColor = vec4(fragmentColor, 1);
}
Then, how can I access to RGB values and change it?
For example, If the pixel values at (u1, v1) on window and (u2, v2) are (0,0,255), then I want to change them to (255,0,0)
With the exception of an OpenGL ES-only extension, fragment shaders cannot just read from the current framebuffer. Otherwise, we wouldn't need blending.
You also can't just render to the image you're reading from in a shader. So if you need to do some sort of post-processing, then that is best done by rendering to a separate image. That is, you do your rendering to image 1, then bind that as a texture and change the FBO so that you're rendering to image 2.
Alternatively, if you have access to OpenGL 4.5/ARB/NV_texture_barrier, then you can use texture barriers to handle this. This permits you a single read/modify/write pass, if you bind the current framebuffer's image as a texture. You'd issue the barrier before doing your read/modify/write, then bind that texture to a sampler while still rendering to that framebuffer.
Also, this requires that the FS read from the exact texel that it would write to. Assuming a viewport anchored at 0,0, the code for this would be texelFetch(sampler, ivec2(gl_FragCoord.xy), 0). You can't read from someone else's texel and modify it.
Obviously you must be rendering to a texture; you cannot use the default framebuffer for this.
Texture barrier could be used for cases where you read from different texels than you write to. But that would require doing something similar to the first case of switching bound images. Though you wouldn't need to change the FBO exactly; you could change the region of the FBO that you render to. That is, so long as you're reading from a different area than you're rendering to, and you use barriers appropriately when switching between those regions, everything is fine.

Best way to do real-time per-pixel filtering with OpenGL?

I have an image that needs to be filtered and then displayed on the screen. Below is a simplified example of what I want to do:
The left image is the screen-buffer as it would be displayed on the screen.
The middle is a filter that should be applied to the screen buffer.
The right image is the screen buffer as it should be displayed to the screen.
I am wondering what the best method of achieving this within the context of OpenGL would be.
Fragment Shader?
Modify the pixels one-by-one?
The final version of this code will be applied to a screen that is constantly changing and needs to be per-pixel filtered no matter what the "original" screen-buffer shows.
Edit, Concerns about fragment shader:
- The fragment shader isn't guaranteed to give fragments of size 1x1, so how would I can't say "ModifiedImage[x][y].red += Filter[x][y].red" Within the fragment shader
You could blend the images together using OpenGL's blending functions (glBlendFunc, glEnable( GL_BLEND ) etc.)

Outline effects in OpenGL

In OpenGL, I can outline objects by drawing the object normally, then drawing it again as a wireframe, using the stencil buffer so the original object is not drawn over. However, this results in outlines with one solid color.
In this image, the pixels of the creature's outline seem to get more transparent the further they are from the creature they outline. How can I achieve a similar effect with OpenGL?
They did not use wireframe for this. I guess it is heavily shader related and requires this:
Rendering object to a stencil buffer
Rendering stencil buffer with color of choice while applying blur
Rendering model on top of it
I'm late for an answer but I was trying to achieve the same thing and thought I'd share the solution I'm using.
A similar effect can be achieved in a single draw operation with a not so complex shader.
In the fragment shader, you will calculate the color of the fragment based on lightning and texture giving you the un-highlighted color 'colorA'.
Your second color is the outline color, 'colorB'.
You should obtain the fragment to camera vector, normalize it, then get the dot product of this vector with the fragment's normal.
The fragment to camera vector is simply the inverse of the fragment's position in eye-space.
The colour of the fragment is then:
float CameraFacingPercentage = dot(v_fragmentToCamera, v_Normal);
gl_FragColor = ColorA * CameraFacingPercentage + ColorB * (1 - FacingCameraPercentage);
This is the basic idea but you'll have to play around to have more or less of the outline color. Also, the concave parts of your model will also be highlighted but that is also the case in the image posted in the question.
Detect edges in GLSL shader using dotprod(view,normal)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/GLSL_Programming/Unity/Toon_Shading#Outlines
As far as I see it the effect on the screen short and many "edge" effects are not pure edges, as in comic outline. What mostly is done, you have one pass were you render the object normally then a pass with only the geometry (no textures) and a GLSL shader. In the fragment shader the normal is taken and that normal is perpendicular to the camera vector you color the object. The effect is then smoothed by including area close to perfect perpendicular.
I would have to look up the exact math but I think if you take the dot product of the camera vector and the normal you get the amount of "perpendicularness". That you can then run through a function like exp to get a bias towards 1.
So (without guarantee that it is correct):
exp(dot(vec3(0, 0, 1), normal));
(Note: everything is in screenspace.)

how to handle depth in glsl

I have a problem with FBO and depth in openGL. I am passing projection, view and model matrices to a shader that writes to the g buffer. When I unbind the FBO and write to gl_FragColor the scene displays as it ought. But when I write to gl_FragData[0] then write the accompanying texture to a screen aligned quad, objects are drawn according to inverse order processed rather than depth... I can see through objects processed first to objects processed after. Has anyone had the same problem and do they know a fix? Or could someone provide syntax on reading depth values from the vertex shader, querying the current depth, then writing to the depth buffer depending on a comparison, ie, handling the operation manually in the fragment shader.
Your main frame-buffer most likely has the depth, while your manually created FBO might not have it. Therefore, when drawing to the screen you have depth-sorted geometry, while your FBO can not provide that and internally works with disabled depth testing having no storage associated with it.

Setting neighbor fragment color via GLSL

I need to setup a GLSL fragment shader to change the color of a fragment other than the one currently being processed. Since that may not seem desirable, I'll provide a very brief context.
The project utilizes a render pass whereby a given model is drawn into an FBO with unique colors that correspond to UV coordinates in the texture map. These colors are then sampled and converted to image coordinates so that the texture map for the model can be updated based on what's visible to the camera. Essentially:
Render model to FBO
For each FBO pixel
1. sample secondary texture based on FBO pixel position
2. convert color at current pixel to image coordinate for the model's texture map
3. update model's texture with sampled secondary texture at calculated coordinate
End loop
The problem is that the current implementation is very CPU bound, so I'm reading the pixels out of the FBO and then manipulating them. Ideally, since I already have the color of the fragment to work with in the fragment shader, I want to just tack on the last few steps to the process and keep everything on the GPU.
The specific issue I'm having is that I don't quite know how (or if it's even possible) to have a fragment shader set the color of a fragment that it is not processing. If I can't work something up by using an extra large FBO and just offsetting the fragment that I want to set the color on, can I work something up that writes directly into a texture?
Any help/advice?
It's not possible to have a fragment shader write to anywhere other than the fragment it is processing. What you probably want to do is ping pong rendering.
In your code, you'd have three textures, matching your listed tasks:
the secondary texture
the source model texture map
the destination model texture map
At a first run, you'd use (1) and (2) as source textures, to draw to (3). Next time through the loop you'd use (1) and (3) to write to (2). Then you'd switch back to using (1) and (2) to write to (3). And so on.
So (2) and (3) are connected with framebuffer objects with the textures supplied as the colour buffer in place of a renderbuffer.
NVidia authored the GL_NV_texture_barrier extension in 2009 that allows you to compact (2) and (3) into a single texture, provided you are explicit about the dividing line between where you're reading and where you're writing. I don't have the expertise to say how widely available it is.
Attempting to read and write to the same texture (as is possible with FBOs) otherwise produces undefined results in OpenGL. Prompting issues at the hardware level are related to caching and multisampling.
As far as I understand, you need a scatter operation (uniform FBO pixel space -> random mesh UV texture destination) to be performed in OpenGL. There is a way to do this, not as simple as you may expect, and not even as fast, but I can't find a better one:
Run a draw call of type GL_POINTS and size equal to the width*height of your source FBO.
Select model texture as a destination FBO color layer, with no depth layer attached
In a vertex shader, compute the original screen coordinate by using gl_VertexID.
Sample from the source FBO texture to get color and target position (assuming your original FBO surface was a texture). Assign a proper gl_Position and pass the target color to the fragment shader.
In a fragment shader, just copy the color to the output.
This will make GPU to go through each of your original FBO pixels and scatter the computed colors over the destination texture.