Is there a way to zoom extents of a collection of shapes without computing min/max xy's and wh's - very painful when sloping lines are involved.
Perhaps some kind of pixel detection?
Related
I want to use a czml to draw some spheres floating around an area of the globe, and I want them to keep the same size regarless of zoom (within limits). This is trivial with a gltf model, but I cannot find a way to do it with an ellipsoid.
I am doing a 2d game using HTML5 Canvas and I want to add 3d characters to the 2D canvas.
Would it be a good (or even possible) solution to use THREE.js on separate "hidden" canvases, 1 for each 3d character. But then, draw those '3d' canvases on to the main 2d canvas?
Can I draw webGL canvases on a '2d' canvas?
Any potential problems with this solution?
Any "best practices" would be violated?
My intuition is that this is a good way to go.
Webgl uses webgl contexts, not 2d. Why do you need different canvas layers ? Anyway you could do it by setting a transparent background yes, but that would be heavy for your browser. What you can do inside a single webgl context (maybe on top of an other 2d context you would need) is to render different scenes with your different characters, the result would be identical
i'm trying to render geometrical shapes over uneven terrain (loaded from heightmap / shapes geometry is also generated based on averaged heights across the heightmap however they do not fit it exactly). I have the following problem - somethimes the terrain shows through the shape like showed on the picture.
Open Image
I need to draw both terrain and shapes with depth testing enabled so they do not obstruct other objects in the scene.. Could someone suggest a solution to make sure the shapes are always rendered on top ? Lifting them up is not really feasible... i need to replace the colors of actual pixel on the terrain and doing this in pixel shader seems too expensive..
thanks in advance
I had a similar problem and this is how I solved it:
You first render the terrain and keep the depth buffer. Do not render
any objects
Render solid bounding box of the shape you want to put on the terrain.
You need to make sure that your bounding box covers all
the height range the shape covers
An over-conservative estimation is to use the global minimum and maximum elevation of the entire
terrain
In the pixel shader, you read depth buffer and reconstructs world space position
You check if this position is inside your shape
In your case you can check if its xy (xz) projection is within the given distance from
the center of your given circle
Transform this position into your shape's local coordinate system and compute the desired color
Alpha-blend over the render target
This method results in shapes perfectly aligned with the terrain surface. It also does not produce any artifacts and works with any terrain.
The possible drawback is that it requires using deferred-style shading and I do not know if you can do this. Still, I hope this might be helpful for you.
I've been seeing a lot of canvas-graphics-related javascript projects and libraries lately and was wondering how they handle the coordinate system. When drawing shapes and vectors on the canvas, are the points calculated based on a cartesian plane and converted for the canvas, or is everything calculated directly for the canvas?
I tried playing around with drawing a circle by graphing all its tangent lines until the line intersections start to resemble a curve and found the difference between the cartesian planes I'm familiar with and the coordinate system used by web browsers very confusing. The function for a circle, for example, "y^2 + x^2 = r^2" would need to be translated to "(y-1)^2 + (x-1)^2 = r^2" to be seen on the canvas. And then negative slopes were positive slopes on the canvas and everything would be upside down :/ .
The easiest way for me to think about it was to pretend the origin of a cartesian plane was in the center of the canvas and adjust my coordinates accordingly. On a 500 x 500 canvas, the center would be 250,250, so if I ended up with a point at 50,50, it would be drawn at (250 + 50, 250 - 50) = (300, 200).
I get the feeling I'm over-complicating this, but I can't wrap my mind around the clean way to work with a canvas.
Current practice can perhaps be exemplified by a quote from David Flanagan's book "JavaScript : The Definitive Guide", which says that
Certain canvas operations and attributes (such as extracting raw
pixel values and setting shadow offsets) always use this default
coordinate system
(the default coordinate system is that of the canvas). And it continues with
In most canvas operations, when you specify the coordinates
of a point, it is taken to be a point in the current coordinate system
[that's for example the cartesian plane you mentioned, #Walkerneo],
not in the default coordinate system.
Why is using a "current coordinate system" more useful than using directly the canvas c.s. ?
First and foremost, I believe, because it is independent of the canvas itself, which is tied to the screen (more specifically, the default coordinate system dimensions are expressed in pixels). Using for instance a Cartesian (orthogonal) coordinate system makes it easy for you (well, for me too, obviously :-D ) to specify your drawing in terms of what you want to draw, leaving the task of how to draw it to the transformations offered by the Canvas API. In particular, you can express dimensions in the natural units of your drawing, and perform a scale and a translation to fit (or not, as the case may be...) your drawing to the canvas.
Furthermore, using transformations is often a clearer way to build your drawing since it allows you to get "farther" from the underlying coord system and specify your drawing in terms of higher level operations ('scale', 'rotate', 'translate' and the more general 'transform'). The abovementioned book gives a very nice exemple of the power of this approach, drawing a Koch (fractal) snowflake in many fewer lines that would be possible (if at all) using canvas coordinates.
The HTML5 canvas, like most graphics systems, uses a coordinate system where (0,0) is in the top left and the x-axis and y-axis go from left to right and top down respectively. This makes sense if you think about how you would create a graphics system with nothing but a block of memory: the simplest way to map coordinates (x,y) to a memory slot is to take x+w*y, where w is the width of a line.
This means that the canvas coordinate system differs from what you use in mathematics in two ways: (0,0) is not the center like it usually is, and y grows down rather than up. The last part is what makes your figures upside down.
You can set transformations on the canvas that make the coordinate system more like what you are used to:
var ctx = document.getElementById('canvas').getContext('2d');
ctx.translate(250,250); // Move (0,0) to (250, 250)
ctx.scale(1,-1); // Make y grow up rather than down
I am making a 3D space game in Stage3D and would like a field of stars drawn behind ALL other objects. I think the problem I'm encountering is that the distances involved are very high. If I have the stars genuinely much farther than other objects I have to scale them to such a degree that they do not render correctly - above a certain size the faces seem to flicker. This also happens on my planet meshes, when scaled to their necessary sizes (12000-100000 units across).
I am rendering the stars on flat plane textures, pointed to face the camera. So long as they are not scaled up too much, they render fine, although obviously in front of other objects that are further away.
I have tried all manner of depthTestModes (Context3DCompareMode.LESS, Context3DCompareMode.GREATER and all the others) combined with including and excluding the mesh in the z-buffer, to get the stars to render only if NO other pixels are present where the star would appear, without luck.
Is anyone aware of how I could achieve this - or, even better, know why, above a certain size meshes do not render properly? Is there an arbitrary upper limit that I'm not aware of?
I don't know Stage3D, and I'm talking in OpenGL language here, but the usual way to draw a background/skybox is to draw the background close up, not far, draw the background first, and either disable depth buffer writing while the background is being drawn (if it does not require depth buffering itself) or clear the depth buffer after the background is drawn and before the regular scene is.
Your flickering of planets may be due to lack of depth buffer resolution; if this is so, you must choose between
drawing the objects closer to the camera,
moving the camera frustum near plane farther out or far plane closer (this will increase depth buffer resolution across the entire scene), or
rendering the scene multiple times at mutually exclusive depth ranges (this is called depth peeling).
You should use starling. It can work
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/away3d-starling-interoperation.html
http://www.flare3d.com/blog/2012/07/24/flare3d-2-5-starling-integration/
You have to look at how projection and vertex shader output is done.
The vertex shader output has four components: x,y,z,w.
From that, pixel coordinates are computed:
x' = x/w
y' = y/w
z' = z/w
z' is what ends up in the z buffer.
So by simply putting z = w*value at the end of your vertex shader you can output any constant value. Just put value = .999 and there you are! Your regular depth less test will work.