I am fairly new to openGL. I have a 3d game that I have running, and it seems to go fairly well. What I would like to do is display an image straight onto the screen, and I am not sure the easiest way to do that. My only idea is to draw a rectangle right in front of the screen and use the image as the texture. It seems like there should be an easier way.
This is for menu screens, and things, so if there is a better way to do that as well, please let me know.
I would recommend setting up OpenGL for 2D rendering via gluOrtho2d(); then, load the image into a texture and, as you said, draw it to the screen by creating a polygon and binding the texture to it. A good example can be found here.
You've got the basic idea. The other obvious alternative is to use glDrawPixels() but I think you'll find the texture method has much better performance. If you're feeling frisky, you might also take a look at Pixel Buffer Objects.
Good luck!
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I am working on a solar system and I wanted to have the background filled with stars. What would be the most appropriate way to accomplish this? Is using skybox better then drawing individual pixels?
Any ideas on good tutorials that would help me with either of these? It doesn't have to be realistic. Something simple would work; however I also like to try something more realistic to see how it would look.
Just learning the basics of OpenGL for a class and was looking for something challenging and interesting to try and draw. Any suggestions?
Aiming to photorealism (just plain models, lights, materials, textures, etc.) is one thing, but what is even more interesting in my opinion is demoscene and all kinds of non-photorealistic effects. The idea of a demo is to program some nice animated graphics that automatically change from one effect to another or tell some sort of a story, and have a background music. Here you can find some videos. Just take a look at what some others have done and use your imagination. That's the funniest part of 3D programming in my opinion. Of course what you'll first program would be something extremely simple when compared to those videos on youtube, but everyone has to start from somewhere. Simple also doesn't need to be ugly. Some random suggestions:
mathematical shapes with sin(), cos(), etc.
alpha blending, especially addition blending (glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE);)
terrain rendering
read 3d model data from a file. (Wavefront .OBJ is a relatively simple one)
feedback effects with glCopyTexImage2D, which copies pixels from screen to a texture (in real life you shouldn't use this because it's too slow, but when learning the basics it's ok)
etc...
You might consider building an OBJ viewer. You will get the experience you're looking for, and it's a pretty good project for a beginning 3D graphics programmer, in terms of difficulty.
I believe opengl has built in shapes such as a teapot that you can call and have it draw. For starters, I'd stick with easy shapes like squares, circles, and cones. Try drawing a wireframe model first since that's the easiest, by using either quadstrips ,triangles or just poly lines. After you've gotten that down, learn to set up lighting and materials so you can draw a solid model.
At school we had a very interesting assignement to get started with OpenGL that I will share. The long term goal was to modelize a living room so you basically have to draw:
A table.
Two chairs.
A carpet.
A sofa
Some stuff that you might find interesting to add on the table for
instance a TV!
When you have all the things done, try to polish the scene a little bit by adding some lighting effects!
Hint: for all the objects you simply need to start with a basic rectangle. Then you can construct your scene step by step using translations/rotations.
I'm looking to create a glowing line effect in BlitzMax, something like a Star Wars lightsaber or laserbeam. Doesn't have to be realtime, but just to TImage objects and then maybe saved to PNG for later use in animation. I'm happy to use 3D features, but it will be for use in a 2D game.
Since it will be on black/space background, my strategy is to draw a series of white blurred lines with color and high transparency, then eventually central lines less blurred and more white. What I want to draw is actually bezier curved lines. Drawing curved lines is easy enough, but I can't use the technique above to create a good laser/neon effect because it comes out looking very segmented. So, I think it may be better to use a blur effect/shader on what does render well, which is a 1-pixel bezier curve.
The problems I've been having are:
Applying a shader to just a certain area of the screen where lines are drawn. If there's a way to do draw lines to a texture and then blur that texture and save the png, that would be great to hear about. There's got to be a way to do this, but I just haven't gotten the right elements working together yet. Any help from someone familiar with this stuff would be greatly appreciated.
Using just 2D calls could be advantageous, simpler to understand and re-use.
It would be very nice to know how to save a PNG that preserves the transparency/alpha stuff.
p.s. I've reviewed this post (and others), have the samples working, and even developed my own 5x5 shader. But, it's 3D and a scene-wide thing that doesn't seem to convert to 2D or just a certain area very well.
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=85263
Ok, well I don't know about BlitzMax, so I can't go into much detail regarding implementation, but to give you some pointers:
For applying shaders to specific parts of the image only, you will probably want to use multiple rendering passes to compose your scene.
If you have pixel access, doing the same things that fragment shaders do is, of course, possible "the oldskool way" in 2D, ie. something like getpixel/setpixel. However, you'll have much poorer performance this way.
If you have a texture with an alpha channel intact, saving in PNG with an alpha channel should Just Work (sorry, once again no idea how to do this in BlitzMax specifically). Just make sure you're using RGBA modes all along.
So I've got this class where I have to make a simple game in OpenGL.
I want to make space invanders (basically).
So how in the world should I make anything appear on my screen that looks decent at all? :(
I found some code, finally, that let me import a 3DS object. It was sweet I thought and went and put it in a class to make it a little more modular and usable (http://www.spacesimulator.net/tut4_3dsloader.html).
However, either the program I use (Cheetah3d) is exporting the uv map incorrectly and/or the code for reading in a .bmp that ISN'T the one that came with the demo. The image is all weird. Very hard to explain.
So I arrive at my question. What solution should I use to draw objects? Should I honestly expect to spend hours guessing at vertices to make a space invader ship? Then also try to map a decent texture to this object as well? The code I am using draws the untextured object just fine but I can't begin to go mapping the texture to it because I don't know what vertices correspond to what polygons etc.
Thanks SO for any suggestions on what I should do. :D
You could draw textured quads, provided you have a texture loader.
I really wouldn't worry too much about your "uv map" - if you can get your vertices right then you can generally cludge something anyway. That's what I'd do.
I guess I'll illustrate with an example:
In this game you are able to draw 2D shapes using the mouse and what you draw is rendered to the screen in real-time. I want to know what the best ways are to render this type of drawing using hardware acceleration (OpenGL). I had two ideas:
Create a screen-size texture when drawing is started, update this when drawing, and blit this to the screen
Create a series of line segments to represent the drawing, and render these using either lines or thin polygons
Are there any other ideas? Which of these methods is likely to be best/most efficient/easiest? Any suggestions are welcome.
I love crayon physics (music gets me every time). Great game!
But back to the point... He has created brush sprites that follow your mouse position. He's created a few brushes that account for a little variation. Once the mouse goes down, I imagine he is adding these sprites to a data structure and sending that structure through his drawing and collision functions to loop through. Thus popping out the real-time effect. He is using Simple DirectMedia Layer library, which I give two thumbs up.
I'm pretty sure the second idea is the way to go.
First option if the player draws pure freehand (rather than lines), and what they draw doesn't need to be animated.
Second option if it is animated or is primarily lines. If you do choose this, it seems like you'd need to draw thin polygons rather than regular lines to get any kind of interesting look (as in the crayon example).