Drawing a line using openGL es 2.0 and iphone touchscreen - opengl-es-2.0

This is the super simple version of the question I posted earlier (Which I think is too complicated)
How do I draw a Line in OpenGL ES 2.0 Using as a reference a stroke on the Touch Screen?
For example If i draw a square with my finger on the screen, i want it to be drawn on the screen with OpenGL.
I have tried researching a lot but no luck so far.
(I only now how to draw objects which already have fixed vertex arrays, no idea of how to draw one with constantly changing array nor how to implement it)

You should use vertex buffer objects (VBOs) as the backing OpenGL structure for your vertex data. Then, the gesture must be converted to a series of positions (I don't know how that happens on your platform). These positions must then be pushed to the VBO with glBufferSubData if the existing VBO is large enough or glBufferData if the existing VBO is too small.
Using VBOs to draw lines or any other OpenGL shape is easy and many tutorials exist to accomplish it.
update
Based on your other question, you seem to be almost there! You already create VBOs like I mentioned but they are probably not large enough. The current size is sizeof(Vertices) as specified in glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(Vertices), Vertices, GL_STATIC_DRAW);
You need to change the size given to glBufferData to something large enough to hold all the original vertices + those added later. You should also use GL_STREAM as the last argument (read up on the function).
To add a new vertex, use something like this :
glBufferSubData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, current_nb_vertices*3*sizeof(float), nb_vertices_to_add, newVertices);
current_nb_vertices += nb_vertices_to_add;
//...
// drawing lines
glDrawArrays(GL_LINE_STRIP, 0, current_nb_vertices);
You don't need the indices in the element array to draw lines.

Related

How To Draw Standard Primitives With Vulkan

Does Vulkan provide functionality to draw basic primitives? Point, Line, Rectangle, Filled Rectangle, Rounded Corner Rectangle, Filled Rounded Corner Rectangle, Circle, Filled Circle, etc.. ?
I don't believe there are any VkCmdDraw* commands that provide this functionality. If that is true, what needs to be done to draw simple primitives like this?
Vulkan is not vector graphics library. It is an API for your GPU.
It does have (square) Points and Lines though. But size other than 1 is optional. And any other high-level features you can think of are not part of the API, except those in VK_EXT_line_rasterization extension.
Rectangle can be a Line Strip of four lines.
Filled Rectangle is probably two filled triangles (resp. Triangle Strip primitive).
Rounded corners and Circles probably could be made by rendering the bounding rectangle, and discarding the unwanted parts of the shape in the Fragment Shader. Or something can be done with a Stencil Buffer. Or there is a Compute Shader, which can do anything. Alternatively they can be emulated with triangles.
There are no such utility functions in Vulkan. If you need to draw a certain primitive you need to provide vertices (and indices) yourself. So if you e.g. want to draw a circle you need to calculate the vertices using standard trigonometric functions, and provide them for your draw calls using a buffer.
This means creating a buffer via vkCreateBuffer, allocating the memory required to store your data into that buffer via vkAllocateMemory and after mapping that buffer into host memory you can copy your primitive's vertices (and/or indices) to such a buffer.
If you're on a nun-unified memory architecture (i.e. desktop GPUs) you also want to upload that data from host to the device for best performance then.
Once you've got a buffer setup, backed by memory and your values stored in that buffer you can draw your primitive using vkCmdDraw*commands.
All available types of primitives are defined in the standard, and can be set through the VkPrimitiveTopology member topology in VkPipelineInputAssemblyStateCreateInfo.
The manual page of VkPrimitiveTopology states the following possible values:
VK_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_POINT_LIST = 0,
VK_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_LINE_LIST = 1,
VK_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_LINE_STRIP = 2,
VK_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_TRIANGLE_LIST = 3,
VK_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_TRIANGLE_STRIP = 4,
VK_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_TRIANGLE_FAN = 5,
VK_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_LINE_LIST_WITH_ADJACENCY = 6,
VK_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_LINE_STRIP_WITH_ADJACENCY = 7,
VK_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_TRIANGLE_LIST_WITH_ADJACENCY = 8,
VK_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_TRIANGLE_STRIP_WITH_ADJACENCY = 9,
VK_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_PATCH_LIST = 10,
You may also need to change polygonMode, if you're rendering a shape you don't want filled.
I don't know if this is any good help, but I have used geometry shaders with OpenGL to draw circles and ellipses. This works by adding a uniform value stating the amount of subdivision and the radius, and then generate a bunch of triangles or a bunch of lines (depending on whether it should be filled or "wireframe". This required a little trigonometry (sin and cos). For filled circles I would use triangle-fan primitive, and for wireframe circles I would use line-loop. For Vulkan: whichever primitive is available, as #theRPGMaster suggested.
I hear many places that geometry shaders are very slow to use, comparably, so that should probably not be your go-to choice, as I assume you picked Vulkan for performance reasons. On thing that geometry shaders could be good for, is the rectangular selection box you see in e.g. Windows Explorer when holding down left mouse button and moving the cursor. At least I found that to work well.
From what I have seen of Vulkan so far it seems even more barebones than OpenGL is, so I would expect nothing in terms of supporting this kind of thing.

First-person game in OpenGL ES 2.0

I know I need to use a frustum projection for a first-person game I'm writing. However, I'm not sure what the most efficient way to move around in the world is.
Currently I'm using
Matrix.setLookAtM(mVMatrix, 0, eyex, eyey, eyez, lookx, looky, lookz, upx, upy, upz);
Matrix.multiplyMM(mMVPMatrix, 0, mProjMatrix, 0, mVMatrix, 0);
every time the display is redrawn. User input changes the "eye", "look" position vectors, and the "up" direction vector.
However, I've read elsewhere that one should tranlate/rotate the world and not the "camera".
My question is: should I rotate the objects about a fixed "camera" (i.e. only use setLookAtM once at set up) or should I carry on using my current method?
There is no such a thing called as camera in OpenGL. In fact, what you describe by moving the objects instead of the viewpoint is what Opengl actually accomplishes internally to give you the feeling that camera moves. There is a great article along with a tutorial that describes all about cameras on OpenGL ES 2 and basically it is the same logic on other versions:
http://db-in.com/blog/2011/04/cameras-on-opengl-es-2-x/
It might seem boring and confusing but I have been searching about cameras on OpenGL ES 2 a lot and this article is almost perfect for a beginner.
To answer your question, your current method is exactly the same that you are describing. The camera is always fixed in OpenGL and what you do with matrix multiplications provides you the effect that you want already. When you multiply your model matrix with view matrix and projection matrix, in the end, you define a new position for your object depending on your camera parameters.

Motion Blur Emplementation on OpenGL ES

I'm a novice in OpenGL ES 1.1(for IOS) texturing and I have a problem with making the effect of motion blur. During googling, I found that I should render my scene in different time moments to several textures and then draw all these textures on the screen with different alpha values. But the problem is that I don't know how to implement all this!So,my questions are:
How to draw a 2D texture on the screen? Should I make a square and put my texture on it?Or may be, there is a way to draw a texture on the screen directly?
How to draw several textures(one upon another) on the screen with different alpha values?
I've already come up with some ideas, but I'm not sure if they are correct or not.
Thanks in advance!
Well, of course the first advice is, understand the basics before trying to do advanced stuff. Other than that:
Yes indeed, to draw a full-screen texture you just draw a textured screen-sized quad. An orthographic projection would be a good idea in this case, making the screen-alignment of the quad and its proper sizing easier. For getting the textures in the first place (by rendering into them), FBOs might be of help, but I'm not sure they are supported on ES 1 devices, otherwise the good old glCopyTexSubImage2D will do, too, albeit requiring a copy operation.
Well, you just draw multiple textured quads (see 1) one over the other. You might configure the texture environment to scale the texture's color with the quad's base color (glTexEnvi(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_MODULATE)) and give your quads a color of (1, 1, 1, alpha) (of course lighting should be disabled). Additionally you have to enable alpha blending (glEnable(GL_BLEND)) and use an appropriate blending function (glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE) should do).
But if all these terms don't tell you anything, you should rather first learn the basics using a good learning resource before delving into more advanced effects.

How do I rotate an OpenGL view relative to the center of the view as opposed to the center of the object being displayed?

I'm working on a fork of Pleasant3D.
When rotating an object being displayed the object always rotates around the same point relative to to itself even if that point is not at the center of the view (e.g. because the user has panned to move the object in the view).
I would like to change this so that the view always rotates the object around the point at the center of the view as it appears to the user instead of the center of the object.
Here is the core of the current code that rotates the object around its center (slightly simplified) (from here):
glLoadIdentity();
// midPlatform is the offset to reach the "middle" of the object (or more specifically the platform on which the object sits) in the x/y dimension.
// This the point around which the view is currently rotated.
Vector3 *midPlatform = [self.currentMachine calcMidBuildPlatform];
glTranslatef((GLfloat)cameraTranslateX - midPlatform.x,
(GLfloat)cameraTranslateY - midPlatform.y,
(GLfloat)cameraOffset);
// trackBallRotation and worldRotation come from trackball.h/c which appears to be
// from an Apple OpenGL sample.
if (trackBallRotation[0] != 0.0f) {
glRotatef (trackBallRotation[0], trackBallRotation[1], trackBallRotation[2], trackBallRotation[3]);
}
// accumlated world rotation via trackball
glRotatef (worldRotation[0], worldRotation[1], worldRotation[2], worldRotation[3]);
glTranslatef(midPlatform.x, midPlatform.y, 0.);
// Now draw object...
What transformations do I need to apply in what order to get the effect I desire?
Some of what I've tried so far
As I understand it this is what the current code does:
"OpenGL performs matrices multiplications in reverse order if multiple transforms are applied to a vertex" (from here). This means that the first transformation to be applied is actually the last one in the code above. It moves the center of the view (0,0) to the center of the object.
This point is then used as the center of rotation for the next two transformations (the rotations).
Finally the midPlatform translation is done in reverse to move the center back to the original location and the XY translations (panning) done by the user is applied. Here also the "camera" is moved away from the object to the proper location (indicated by cameraOffset).
This seems straightforward enough. So what I need to change is instead of translating the center of the view to the center of the object (midPlatform) I need to translate it to the current center of the view as seen by the user, right?
Unfortunately this is where the transformations start affecting each other in interesting ways and I am running into trouble.
I tried changing the code to this:
glLoadIdentity();
glTranslatef(0,
0,
(GLfloat)cameraOffset);
if (trackBallRotation[0] != 0.0f) {
glRotatef (trackBallRotation[0], trackBallRotation[1], trackBallRotation[2], trackBallRotation[3]);
}
// accumlated world rotation via trackball
glRotatef (worldRotation[0], worldRotation[1], worldRotation[2], worldRotation[3]);
glTranslatef(cameraTranslateX, cameraTranslateY, 0.);
In other words, I translate the center of the view to the previous center, rotate around that, and then apply the camera offset to move the camera away to the proper position. This makes the rotation behave exactly the way I want it to, but it introduces a new issue. Now any panning done by the user is relative to the object. For example if the object is rotated so that the camera is looking along the X axis end-on, if the user pans left to right the object appears to be moving closer/further from the user instead of left or right.
I think I can understand why the is (XY camera translations being applied before rotation), and I think what I need to do is figure out a way to cancel out the translation from before the rotation after the rotation (to avoid the weird panning effect) and then to do another translation which translates relative to the viewer (eye coordinate space) instead of the object (object coordinate space) but I'm not sure exactly how to do this.
I found what I think are some clues in the OpenGL FAQ(http://www.opengl.org/resources/faq/technical/transformations.htm), for example:
9.070 How do I transform my objects around a fixed coordinate system rather than the object's local coordinate system?
If you rotate an object around its Y-axis, you'll find that the X- and Z-axes rotate with the object. A subsequent rotation around one of these axes rotates around the newly transformed axis and not the original axis. It's often desirable to perform transformations in a fixed coordinate system rather than the object’s local coordinate system.
The root cause of the problem is that OpenGL matrix operations postmultiply onto the matrix stack, thus causing transformations to occur in object space. To affect screen space transformations, you need to premultiply. OpenGL doesn't provide a mode switch for the order of matrix multiplication, so you need to premultiply by hand. An application might implement this by retrieving the current matrix after each frame. The application multiplies new transformations for the next frame on top of an identity matrix and multiplies the accumulated current transformations (from the last frame) onto those transformations using glMultMatrix().
You need to be aware that retrieving the ModelView matrix once per frame might have a detrimental impact on your application’s performance. However, you need to benchmark this operation, because the performance will vary from one implementation to the next.
And
9.120 How do I find the coordinates of a vertex transformed only by the ModelView matrix?
It's often useful to obtain the eye coordinate space value of a vertex (i.e., the object space vertex transformed by the ModelView matrix). You can obtain this by retrieving the current ModelView matrix and performing simple vector / matrix multiplication.
But I'm not sure how to apply these in my situation.
You need to transform/translate "center of view" point into origin, rotate, then invert that translation, back to the object's transform. This is known as a basis change in linear algebra.
This is way easier to work with if you have a proper 3d-math library (I'm assuming you do have one), and that also helps to to stay far from the deprecated fixed-pipeline APIs. (more on that later).
Here's how I'd do it:
Find the transform for the center of view point in world coordinates (figure it out, then draw it to make sure it's correct, with x,y,z axis too, since the axii are supposed to be correct w.r.t. the view). If you use the center-of-view point and the rotation (usually the inverse of the camera's rotation), this will be a transform from world origin to the view center. Store this in a 4x4 matrix transform.
Apply the inverse of the above transform, so that it becomes the origin. glMultMatrixfv(center_of_view_tf.inverse());
Rotate about this point however you want (glRotate())
Transform everything back to world space (glMultMatrixfv(center_of_view_tf);)
Apply object's own world transform (glTranslate/glRotate or glMultMatrix) and draw it.
About the fixed function pipeline
Back in the old days, there were separate transistors for transforming a vertex (or it's texture coordinates), computing where light was in relation to it applying lights (up to 8) and texturing fragments in many different ways. Simply, glEnable(), enabled fixed blocks of silicon to do some computation in the hardware graphics pipeline. As performance grew, die sized shrunk and people demanded more features, the amount of dedicated silicon grew too, and much of it wasn't used.
Eventually, it got so advanced that you could program it in rather obscene ways (register combiners anyone). And then, it became feasible to actually upload a small assembler program for all vertex-level transforms. Then, it made to sense to keep a lot of silicon there that just did one thing (especially as you could've used those transistors to make the programmable stuff faster), so everything became programmable. If "fixed function" rendering was called for, the driver just converted the state (X lights, texture projections, etc) to shader code and uploaded that as a vertex shader.
So, currently, where even the fragment processing is programmable, there is just a lot of fixed-function options that is used by tons and tons of OpenGL applications, but the silicon on the GPU just runs shaders (and lots of it, in parallell).
...
To make OpenGL more efficient, and the drivers less bulky, and the hardware simpler and useable on mobile/console devices and to take full advantage of the programmable hardware that OpenGL runs on these days, many functions in the API are now marked deprecated. They are not available on OpenGL ES 2.0 and beyond (mobile) and you won't be getting the best performance out of them even on desktop systems (where they will still be in the driver for ages to come, serving equally ancient code bases originating back to the dawn of accelerated 3d graphics)
The fixed-functionness mostly concerns how transforms/lighting/texturing etc. are done by "default" in OpenGL (i.e. glEnable(GL_LIGHTING)), instead of you specifying these ops in your custom shaders.
In the new, programmable, OpenGL, transform matrices are just uniforms in the shader. Any rotate/translate/mult/inverse (like the above) should be done by client code (your code) before being uploaded to OpenGL. (Using only glLoadMatrix is one way to start thinking about it, but instead of using gl_ModelViewProjectionMatrix and the ilk in your shader, use your own uniforms.)
It's a bit of a bother, since you have to implement quite a bit of what was done by the GL driver before, but if you have your own object list/graph with transforms and a transform somewhere etc, it's not that much work. (OTOH, if you have a lot of glTranslate/glRotate in your code, it might be...). As I said, a good 3d-math library is indispensable here.
-..
So, to change the above code to "programmable pipeline" style, you'd just do all these matrix multiplications in your own code (instead of the GL driver doing it, still on the CPU) and then send the resulting matrix to opengl as a uniform before you activate the shaders and draw your object from VBOs.
(Note that modern cards do not have fixed-function code, just a lot of code in the driver to compile fixed-function rendering state to a shader that does the job. No wonder "classic" GL drivers are huge...)
...
Some info about this process is available at Tom's Hardware Guide and probably Google too.

how to generate graphs using integer values in iphone

i want to show a grapph/bar chart in iphone how do i do this without custom API;s
You may want to investigate the Core Plot project [code.google.com]. Core Plot was the subject of this year's scientific coding project at WWDC and is pretty useable for some cases already. From its inception, Core Plot was intended for both OS X and iPhone uses. The source distribution (there hasn't been a binary release yet) comes with both OS X and iPhone example applications and there's info on the project wiki for using it as a library in an iPhone app. Here's an example of it's current plotting capabilities.
(source: googlecode.com)
Write your own. It's not easy, I'm in the process of doing the same thing right now. Here's how I'm doing it:
First, ignore any desire you may have to try using a UIScrollView if you want to allow zooming. It's totally not worth it.
Second, create something like a GraphElement protocol. I have a hierarchy that looks something like this:
GraphElement
GraphPathElement
GraphDataElement
GraphDataSupplierElement
GraphElement contains the basic necessary methods for a graph element, including how to draw, a maximum width (for zooming in), whether a point is within that element (for touches) and the standard touchBegan, touchMoved, and touchEnded functions.
GraphPathElement contains a CGPath, a line color and width, a fill color and a drawing mode. Whenever it's prompted to draw, it simply adds the path to the context, sets the colors and line width, and draws the path with the given drawing mode.
GraphDataElement, as a subclass of GraphPathElement, takes in a set of data in x-y coordinates, a graph type (bar or line), a frame, and a bounds. The frame is the actual size of the created output CGPath. The bounds is the size of the data in input coordinates. Essentially, it lets you scale the data to the screen size.
It creates a graph by first calculating an affine transform to transform the bounds to the frame, then it loops through each point and adds it as data to a path, applying that transform to the point before adding it. How it adds data depends on the type.
If it's a bar graph, it creates a rectangle of width 0, origin at (x,frame.size.height-y), and height=y. Then it "insets" the graph by -3 pixels horizontally, and adds that to the path.
If it's a line graph, it's much simpler. It just moves to the first point, then for each other point, it adds a line to that point, adds a circle in a rect around that point, then moves back to that point to go on to the next point.
GraphDataSupplierElement is the interface to my database that actually contains all the data. It determines what kind of graph it should be, formats the data into the required type for GraphDataElement, and passes it on, with the color to use for that particular graph.
For me, the x-axis is time, and is represented as NSTimeIntervals. The GraphDataSupplierElement contains a minDate and maxDate so that a GraphDateElement can draw the x-axis labels as required.
Once all this is done, you need to create the actual graph. You can go about it several ways. One option is to keep all the elements in an NSArray and whenever drawRect: is called, loop through each element and draw it. Another option is to create a CALayer for each element, and use the GraphPathElement as the CALayer's delegate. Or you could make GraphPathElement extend from CALayer directly. It's up to you on this one. I haven't gotten as far as trying CALayers yet, I'm still stuck in the simple NSArray stage. I may move to CALayers at some point, once I'm satisfied with how everything looks.
So, all in all, the idea is that you create the graph as one or many CGPaths beforehand, and just draw that when you need to draw the graph, rather than trying to actually parse data whenever you get a drawRect: call.
Scaling can be done by keeping the source data in your GraphDataElement, and just change the frame so that the scaling of the bounds to the frame creates a CGPath wider than the screen, or whatever your needs are. I basically re-implemented my own pinch-zoom for my Graph UIView subclass that only scales horizontally, by changing its transform, then on completion, get the current frame, reset the transform to identity, set the frame to the saved value, and set the frame of all of the GraphElements to the new frame as well, to make them scale. Then just call [self setNeedsDisplay] to draw.
Anyway, that's a bit ramble-ish, but it's an outline of how I made it happen. If you have more specific questions, feel free to comment.