Question on rendering grass using billboard texture - opengl

every one, i have been doing some work on rendering grass using billboard textures recent days, and i met some problems,
it looks not so bad when the camera'angle with xz plane is not big, but when the angle is bigger until the camera is on the top of the billboard, it looks very bad, a cross line just can be seen, and not like real grass.
so the problems are as follow:
1. could someone tell me how to fix this problem?(looks like cross)
2 what's more, i did not add light or other shader effect, so the result looks not real, and a more important factor is the texture i used is not good enough, could anyone provide some better texture? and teach me how to add light effect and shader effect?
Thanks a lot.
regards.

Use billboard grass in the distance, and real, or at least more detailed geometry up close.

Related

openGL simple 2d light

I am making a simple pixel top-down game. And I want to add some simple lights there, but I don't know what the best way to do that. This image is an example of light what I want to realise.
http://imgur.com/a/PpYiR
When I googled that task, I saw only solutions for that kind of light.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVlYsGOkkyM
But I need to increase a brightness of the texture part when the light source is near. How can I do this if I am using textures with GL_QUADS without UV?
Ok, my response may not totally answer you question, but it will lead you down the right path.
It appears you are using immediate mode, this is now depreciated and changing to VBOs (vertex buffer objects) will make you life easier.
The lighting in the picture appears to be hand drawn. You cannot create that style of lighting exactly with even the best algorithm.
You really have two options to solve your problem, and both of them will require texture coordinates and shaders.
You could go with lightmaps, which use a pre generated texture multiplied over the texture of a quad. This is extremely fast, but requires some sort of tool to generate the lightmaps which might be a bit over your head at the moment.
Instead, learn shader based lighting. Many tutorials exist for 3d lighting but the principles remain the same for 2D.
Some Googling will get you the resources you need to implement shaders.
A basic distance based lighting algorithm will look like this:
GL_Color = texturecolor * 1.0/distance(light_position,world_position);
It multiplies the color of the texel by how far away the texel is from the light position. There are tutorials that go more into depth on this.
If you want to make the lighting look "retro" like in the first image,you can downsample the colors in a postprocesing step.

Simulate Distortion of Spherical Billboard

I need to make spherical billboards (i.e., setting depth), but taking into account perspective projection--ideally including off-center frusta.
I wasn't able to find any references to anyone succeeding at this--although there are plenty of explanations as to why standard billboards don't have perspective distortions. Unfortunately, for my application, the lack isn't a cosmetic defect; it's actually important to the algorithm.
I did a bit of investigation on my own:
The math gets pretty messy rather quickly. The obvious approaches don't work: for example, you can't orient the billboard perpendicular to a viewing ray because tangential rays wouldn't intersect the billboard at right angles.
Probably the most promising approach I found was to render the billboard parallel to the near clipping plane, stretching it with a vertex shader into an ellipse. This only handles perturbations along one axis (so e.g. it won't handle spheres rendered in a corner of the view), but the main obstacle is calculating depth correctly; you can't compute it as you would for an undistorted sphere because the "sphere" is occluding itself.
Point of fact, I didn't find a good solution, and I couldn't find anyone who has. Anyone have an idea?
While browsing around not even remotely working on this problem, I stumbled on http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/sphereproj/sphereproj.htm, which is pretty close. The linked tutorial shows how to compute a bounding ellipse for a rasterized sphere; getting the depth (at worst, using a raycast) should be fairly easy to derive.

Occlusion with octrees

I just started learning opengl and writing a first person shooter but I'm getting horrible framerates when I draw 5000 cubes. So now I'm attempting to perform occlusion and culling using an octree. What I'm confused about is where to cast the rays from. Do I only cast them from the fustrum near plane? It seems like I would miss part of the fustrum that expands. Any help is appreciated.
If 5000 cubes already gives bad framerates, you should consider changing the way you render your cubes.
It's very unclear to us what you are drawing the cubes for. If they are static (ie. don't move), then its best to pack them all into a single vertex buffer. If the cubes are supposed to move, then you should go for instancing. If you're going for a landscape made of cubes like minecraft, then you should create vertex buffers but only put in the faces of cubes that are actually visible.
I'd like to help more, but I'm unsure what you're doing.

OpenGL texturing via vertex alphas, how to avoid following diagonal lines?

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.

OpenGl And Flickering

When objects from a CallList intersect the near plane I get a flicker..., what can I do?
Im using OpenGL and SDL.
Yes it is double buffered.
It sounds like you're getting z-fighting.
"Z-fighting is a phenomenon in 3D rendering that occurs when two or more primitives have similar values in the z-buffer, and is particularly prevalent with coplanar polygons. The effect causes pseudo-random pixels to be rendered with the color of one polygon or another in a non-deterministic manner, varying as the scene is animated, causing one polygon to "win" the z test, then another, and so on."
(From wikipedia)
You can get more information about the problem in the OpenGL FAQ.
glPolygonOffset might help, but you can also get yourself into trouble with it. Tom Forsyth has a good explanation in his FAQ Note: It talks about ZBIAS, but that's just the DirectX equivilent.
The problem was that my rotation function had some floating point errors which screwed up my model_view matrix.
None of you could have guessed it, sorry for the waste of your time.
Although I don't think that moving the near plane should be even considered a solution to any kind of problem usually something else is wrong, because openGL does support polygon intersection with the near plane.
Try to put the near clipping plane a little bit further :
for example with gluPerspective -> third parameter zNear
http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs/man_pages/hardcopy/GL/html/glu/perspective.html
Ah, you meant the near plane. :)
Well...another thing when drawing polygons in the same plane is to use glPolygonOffset
From the description
glPolygonOffset is useful for rendering hidden-line images,
for applying decals to surfaces, and for rendering solids
with highlighted edges.