OpenGL ES 2.0: attach smaller texture to framebuffer - opengl-es-2.0

I have implemented bloom post process effect in my game for Android using render to texture and proper shaders. It works, but the performance hit is unacceptable. So I thought that I could render the scene to smaller texture and then stretch the texture to fullscreen. The trouble is that when I attach a texture that is smaller than the viewport to the off screen framebuffer, the scene is cropped. The image below illustrates the issue:
Is there any way I could "map" the attached texture to the framebuffer somehow, so the whole viewport gets rendered to it? I could probably modify the projection matrix to achieve the goal, but that would complicate my code and I would rather avoid it.

I think you can do that by simply changing the Viewport to match the texture dimensions before you do the render to texture, then set the viewport back to the dimensions of the View before you render to the framebuffer. There should be no significant performance loss because you will be calling glViewport() twice as often.
Your suggestion about scaling the projection matrix should also work.

Related

Rendering line art with constant screen width

I have a line art texture applied to an object in 3D space. The default behavior is for the object and the texture to receive perspective scaling based on the perspective model view projection matrix. Is there any established technique to keep the positioning and scaling of the 3D object, while keeping the line width constant relative to the screen? The desired effect is as though a pen (fixed screen width) were used to trace a path on the 3D object.
Would something like SDF-based font rendering help?
Or maybe some kind of projective texture mapping?
Or render the object and texture to a buffer and expand the lines using edge detection?
Unfortunately, I'm using OGL ES 2, so I can't use a geom shader or anything like that.
The solution I came up with is inspired by procedural SDF generation, like #Felipe suggested, combined with Chris Green's Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects.
Basically I hand draw shapes into textures using pure red, green, and blue. Then I render the scene using those textures, and generate an SDF on the fly in a second render pass. The SDF generation uses Green's algorithm with a small spread to improve performance. The SDF is then passed to a final render pass that thresholds and antialiases the SDF per Green's approach, using fwidth to maintain a constant line weight regardless of the distance of the object to the camera.
Since the original question was just for the approach/concept, I'm not posting an example at the moment. But I'll see if I can put together a shadertoy sometime soon.
You could create the texture procedurally in a fragment shader and use the size of a pixel for interpolations.
See:
FabriceNeyret's blog

How can I overlay my UI render target onto the back buffer using DirectX 11?

I have two render targets, the back buffer and a UI render target where all 2d UI will be drawn.
I have used the graphics debugger to confirm that both render targets are being written to with the correct data, but I'm having trouble combining the two right at the end.
Question:
My world objects are drawn directly to the backbuffer so there is no problem displaying these, but how do I now overlay the UI render target OVER the backbuffer?
Desired effect:
Back buffer render target
UI render target
There's several ways to do this. The easiest is to render your UI elements to a texture that has both a RenderTargetView and a ShaderResourceView, then render the whole texture to the back buffer as a single quad in orthographic projection space. This effectively draws a 2D square containing your UI in screen space on the back buffer. It also has the benefit of allowing transparency.
You could also use the OutputMerger stage to blend the UI render target with the back buffer during rendering of the world geometry. You'd need to be careful how you set up your blend operations, as it could result in items being drawn over the UI, or blending inappropriately.
If your UI is not transparent, you could do the UI rendering first and mark the area under the UI in the stencil buffer, then do your world rendering while the stencil test is enabled. This would cause the GPU to ignore any pixels underneath the UI, and not send them to the pixel shader.
The above could also be modified to write the minimum depth value to the pixels within the UI render target, ensuring all geometry underneath it would fail the depth test. This modification would free up the stencil buffer for mirrors/shadows/etc.
The above all work for flat UIs drawn over the existing 3D world. To actually draw more complex UIs that appear to be a part of the world, you'll need to actually render the elements to 3D objects in the world space, or do complex projection operations to make it seem like they are.

Blender border render internals

I would like to know how Blender's border render works internally. How can Blender compute lights if it has not information about the lights in the tiles he won't render? I have not found any reference (source code excluded) on how this feature of blender works. Can somebody explain it (or give me some reference)?
The render border setting only alters what part of the image is rendered, it does not alter what data is sent to the render engine to generate the image.
You can test this by placing an object with a reflective surface in front of the camera and another object behind the camera, the object behind the camera will show in the reflection. The border setting doesn't change the reflection in the object, it only changes what part of the image is rendered.
Rendering an image starts at the pixel that will be visible in the final image and sends a "ray" into the scene to determine what colour the specific pixel will be. Each ray will bounce around in the scene from object to object to light source based on render settings to calculate the final result. While the render border will reduce the pixels used as the starting point for each ray, it does not reduce the objects or lights in the scene that each ray may come into contact with. Each ray going through the scene will see every visible object and light in the scene that can influence the final result for each pixel.
This conference video explains ray types and might give you a better grasp of how a ray goes through a scene to get the final image.

Render texture and normalized view rect in Unity

I'm using Unity 3D 3.5 pro.
I've got this scene with two cameras in it. One of them is looking at a plane that has a render texture on it. The other is recording the render texture. When the camera that's recording the render texture has a 1:1 normalized view and height rect, everything is fine. But when It's something different, some weird stuff happens -- the render texture's image becomes distorted. I've tried releasing and discarding the render texture's contents in an update function, but nothing changes! It's totally stopping the project I'm working on from being completed. I have pictures here to explain the situation in detail. The reason its a problem is because i need to be able to place non rectangular objects in front of the square and not have their scales appear to be distorted, due to the scale of the plane on which the render texture is being shown not being a square. What could I be doing wrong?
I also placed a similar question on unity answers, but received no usable help there. Here was the thread:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/389094/rendertexture-normalized-view-rect.html
I figured it out. I needed to mess with the offset and tiling of the rendertexture. Silly rabbit!

Using WebGL or OpenGL ES 2, how do I render the contents of an RBO onscreen?

Using WebGL (which is constrained to the OpenGL ES 2 API), I am successfully rendering to texture and then displaying that texture onscreen. Because it is a texture, it is not being antialiased. If I were rendering to an RBO and then displaying that onscreen, I would be able to take advantage of AA.
My render target setup looks like this:
Create FBO
Bind FBO
Create texture (to be rendered to)
Create and bind depth buffer as RBO
Attach texture and RBO to FBO
And my rendering update loop looks like this:
Render the scene to the FBO created in step #2 above
Render a screen aligned quad with the texture created in step #3 above
With desktop OpenGL, I would call glBlitFramebuffer() instead of drawing the screen aligned quad.
How do I render my scene with antialiasing? Do I need to replace the texture with an RBO? If so, what calls do I use to bind the RBO to draw a screen-aligned quad?
You cannot blit the contents of an RBO to screen in WebGL unless you perform a readback and re-upload to texture to blit, which is rather slow.
WebGL has no support for MSAA on FBOs in any form (neither as RBO nor as RTT).
You can implement your own antialiasing in a variety of ways.
Render at 2:2 size and scale down (google maps with webgl does this)
Render at 1:1 size, run a sobel or laplace edge detection on color and depth, and run a bilateral gaussian blur using edge strength as weight (I've used this technique in some of my demos, it works well, http://codeflow.org/entries/2011/apr/11/advanced-webgl-part-1/ )
Use the morphological antialiasing recipe from GPU Pro 2 (I've yet to try that)