I would like to create a wire frame effect using a shader program written in AGAL for Stage3D.
I have been Googling and I understand that I can determine how close a pixel is to the edge of a triangle using barycentric coordinates (BC) passed into the fragment program via the vertex program, then colour it accordingly if it is close enough.
My confusion is in what method I would use to pass this information into the shader program. I have a simple example set up with a cube, 8 vertices and an index buffer to draw triangles between using them.
If I was to place the BC's into the vertex buffer then that wouldn't make sense as they would need to be different depending on which triangle was being rendered; e.g. Vetex1 might need (1,0,0) when rendered with Vetex2 and Vetex3, but another value when rendered with Vetex5 and Vetex6. Perhaps I am not understanding the method completely.
Do I need to duplicate vertex positions and add the aditional data into the vertex buffer, essentially making 3 vertices per triangle and tripling my vertex count?
Do I always give the vertex a (1,0,0), (0,1,0) or (0,0,1) value or is this just an example?
Am I over complicating this and is there an easier way to do wire-frame with shaders and Stage3d?
Hope that fully explains my problems. Answers are much appreciated, thanks!
It all depends on your geomtery, and this problem is in fact a problem of graph vertex coloring: you need your geometry graph to be 3-colorable. The good starting point is the Wikipedia article.
Just for example, let's assume that (1, 0, 0) basis vector is red, (0, 1, 0) is green and (0, 0, 1) is blue. It's obvious that if you build your geometry using the following basic element
then you can avoid duplicating vertices, because such graph will be 3-colorable (i.e. each edge, and thus each triangle, will have differently colored vertices). You can tile this basic element in any direction, and the graph will remain 3-colorable:
You've stumbled upon the thing that drives me nuts about AGAL/Stage3D. Limitations in the API prevent you from using shared vertices in many circumstances. Wireframe rendering is one example where things break down...but simple flat shading is another example as well.
What you need to do is create three unique vertices for each triangle in your mesh. For each vertex, add an extra param (or design your engine to accept vertex normals and reuse those, since you wont likely be shading your wireframe).
Assign each triangle a unit vector A[1,0,0], B[0,1,0], or C[0,0,1] respectively. This will get you started. Note, the obvious solution (thresholding in the fragment shader and conditionally drawing pixels) produces pretty ugly aliased results. Check out this page for some insight in techniques to anti-alias your fragment program rendered wireframes:
http://cgg-journal.com/2008-2/06/index.html
As I mentioned, you need to employ a similar technique (unique vertices for each triangle) if you wish to implement flat shading. Since there is no equivalent to GL_FLAT and no way to make the varying registers return an average, the only way to implement flat shading is for each vertex pass for a given triangle to calculate the same lighting...which implies that each vertex needs the same vertex normal.
Related
Theres 2 parts to my problem and they are related. I have a weird shape on my interface illustrated below, I am trying to randomly spawn MovieClips within its' boundaries but I am having some trouble finding a good way to do it.
Question 1: I can run an If condition to check with bitMapData.hitTest to see if the MovieClip has randomly spawn within this shape, if it doesn't simply retry with a new set of random coordinates. However, is there a better way? Like a way to only take into account coordinates within the shape? There will be plenty of MC spawned at one go so I am hoping to lessen the load, or at least find an efficient way to do this calculation.
Question 2: The MovieClips spawned within this shape will eventually have collision detection mechanics that will repel itself when interacted with. Is there a way to contain them within this shape via some kind of boundary detection?
If it was a square, we could easily have contained them with a quick check on all 4 edges, but not with this shape. Currently I am thinking of using bitMapData.hitTest again to detect for out-of-bounds after being repelled, but how do I know which Point() is the nearest 'edge' of this shape to return the MC to?
For question 1: I'm going to go on an assumption that you have some geometry data about the shape.
One method you can use to check if a point is within a shape is to take that point, then draw a line from that point to infinity (the edge of the screen) in one direction. Then count how many times that line intersects an edge of the shape. If it's odd, the point is within the shape (or on the edge) and if it's even, than that point is outside of the shape.
First link in google: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-check-if-a-given-point-lies-inside-a-polygon/
Or can also try a more simple method (at the cost of doing more work): if the above shape is generated with all squares and rectangles and you know the point and size of all of those: can just do a check for the point vs all the squares and rectangles that make up the shape.
For question 2: As Organis mentioned, I'd go with a library like Box2D to do this. You'll most likely spend tons of time (that you may not want to) if you try to implement this alone.
The big issue is how much cpu or gpu the code uses. You're trying to avoid using any collision detection. Collision detection is having code do calculations to determine the edges of an object. It should be the last option.
Most of the time you know there's no need for collision detection. You know where everything is and how big it is. Everything has a centerpoint and comparing simple number coordinates is the lightweight way to check if there's a need to check further.
When things get near each other, you only need to do a collision detection on the immediate area around an object. See how your shape fits in a box that is easy to check for collisions? That box should get a collision check before the actual jagged shape inside it.
Yes that collision detection box has to be drawn or mapped but it's done when the object is defined, not when the game is playing. If you are using sprite sheets, keep an xml of the boxes or circles around the shapes.
Let's say I use the Graphics class at runtime to draw some vector shapes dynamically. For example a square and a circle.
Is there a way to create a new shape at runtime where those 2 vectors shapes overlap?
Those kind of operations are very common in all vector design programs such as Illustrator, Corel, etc... but I haven't found anything in Adobe's documentation, nor anywhere else, to do it by code.
Although drawing operations on the Graphics class are described in terms of lines, points etc this is - as far as you're concerned - just telling it what to draw onto a bitmap. There's no way to remove a shape once drawn, short of clear(), which just wipes the whole thing clean.
I don't fully understand why, as the vector data must be retained - there's no loss of quality on scaling after drawing, for example.
If you don't want to get into some hardcore maths (for anything beyond straight lines, you'll need to) there's an answer here which might help if you've ever used PixelBender:
How to calculate intersection between shapes in flash / action script ? (access to shape's segments and nodes?)
Failing that, if it's just cosmetic you could play around with masking shapes (will probably end up quite hacky though) - however, if you actually want to use the intersection to draw or describe a shape you will need to dig out your maths book or look for a good graphics library.
Hope this helps
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.
I'm relatively new to graphics programming, and I've just been reading some books and have been scanning through tutorials, so please pardon me if this seems a silly question.
I've got the basics of directx11 up and running, and now i'm looking to have some fun. so naturally I've been reading heavily into the shader pipeline, and i'm already fascinated. The idea of writing a simple, minuscule piece of code that has to be efficient enough to run maybe tens of thousands of times every 60th of a second without wasting resources has me in a hurry to grasp the concept before continuing on and possibly making a mess of things. What i'm having trouble with is grasping what the pixel shader is actually doing.
Vertex shaders are simple to understand, you organize the vertices of an object in uniform data structures that relate information about it, like position and texture coordinates, and then pass each vertex into the shader to be converted from 3d to 2d by way of trasformation matrices. As long as i understand it, i can work out how to code it.
But i don't get pixel shaders. What i do get is that the output of the vertex shader is the input of the pixel shader. So wouldn't that just be handing the pixel shader the 2d coordinates of the polygon's vertices? What i've come to understand is that the pixel shader receives individual pixels and performs calculations on them to determine things like color and lighting. But if that's true, then which pixels? the whole screen or just the pixels that lie within the transformed 2d polygon?
or have i misunderstood something entirely?
Vertex shaders are simple to understand, you organize the vertices of an object in uniform data structures that relate information about it, like position and texture coordinates, and then pass each vertex into the shader to be converted from 3d to 2d by way of trasformation matrices.
After this, primitives (triangles or multiples of triangles) are generated and clipped (in Direct3D 11, it is actually a little more complicated thanks to transform feedback, geometry shaders, tesselation, you name it... but whatever it is, in the end you have triangles).
Now, fragments are "generated", i.e. a single triangle is divided into little cells with a regular grid, the output attributes of the vertex shader are interpolated according to each grid cell's relative position to the three vertices, and a "task" is set up for each little grid cell. Each of these cells is a "fragment" (if multisampling is used, several fragments may be present for one pixel1).
Finally, a little program is executed over all these "tasks", this is the pixel shader (or fragment shader).
It takes the interpolated vertex attributes, and optionally reads uniform values or textures, and produces one output (it can optionally produce several outputs, too). This output of the pixel shader refers to one fragment, and is then either discarded (for example due to depth test) or blended with the frame buffer.
Usually, many instances of the same pixel shader run in parallel at the same time. This is because it is more silicon efficient and power efficient to have a GPU run like this. One pixel shader does not know about any of the others running at the same time.
Pixel shaders commonly run in a group (also called "warp" or "wavefront"), and all pixel shaders within one group execute the exact same instruction at the same time (on different data). Again, this allows to build more powerful chips that user less energy, and cheaper.
1Note that in this case, the fragment shader still only runs once for every "cell". Multisampling only decides whether or not it stores the calculated value in one of the higher resolution extra "slots" (subsamples) according to the (higher resolution) depth test. For most pixels on the screen, all subsamples are the same. However, on edges, only some subsamples will be filled by close-up geometry whereas some will keep their value from further away "background" geometry. When the multisampled image is resolved (that is, converted to a "normal" image), the graphics card generates a "mix" (in the easiest case, simply the arithmetic mean) of these subsamples, which results in everything except edges coming out the same as usual, and edges being "smoothed".
Your understanding of pixel shaders is correct in that it "receives individual pixels and performs calculations on them to determine things like color and lighting."
The pixels the shader receives are the individual ones calculated during the rasterization of the transformed 2d polygon (the triangle to be specific). So whereas the vertex shader processes the 3 points of the triangle, the pixel shader processes the pixels, one at a time, that "fill in" the triangle.
I'm looking for the series of steps necessary to draw a filled polygon. I will create a function that renders it to a bitmap. I'm writing in a language similar to visual basic, but without most of the object oriented stuff like classes and inheritance, and the drawing capabilities are drawline() and drawrect() and that is it, but it can scale and rotate a completed bitmap object, so, when I fill the polygon, it will be one dot at a time in a for loop or a while loop, however, I can convert the bitmap to a byte array if that makes any difference (might be faster?) so if you have a method that would treat a completed polygon line as a byte array and fill it that way, might be faster than 100,000 plot(x,y) commands? I don't know, either way would be interesting to look at.
I'm not trying to draw irregular polygons, just symmetrical (radial symmetry) with an arbitrary number of sides, minimum 3, centered in the bitmap area.
Drawing method is cartesian with 0,0 being uppper left of the bitmap. I guess the inputs would look something like:
drawpolygon(bitmapobj,width,height,sides,radius)
Perhaps radius is not necessary since the size of the bitmap will be the limit of the polygon?
Looking for steps in English instead of code, if possible, but code could be useful if it doesn't have too many language specific aspects (for instance, c++ has a bunch of declarations, type casting pointers, stuff I don't have to deal with and am not 100% sure how to convert to the language I'm using).
There is an equation given here (the last one).
By looping over all the x and y coordinates, and checking that the output of this equation is less than zero, you can determine which points are 'inside' and colour them appropraitely.