We have Android app using hardware acceleration drawing some standard items and widgets. And also I have fancy native drawing using OpenGL. The question is, can I mix it with canvas drawing, in method onDraw for example? Does canvas preserve state or made an assumption that there is no such code?
Why do I want it. I want to have one rendering context for drawing, because two drops FPS to no more than 30.
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Im looking for Android 2D framework which allows me to create canvas layer on which I can draw simple shapes like rect, oval atc (raster graphics). The canvas have to PERSIST everything I draw on it.
I found many engines (libgdx, andengine ...) but if they have capability to draw shapes, its only for one screen update. Reason becouse I dont store drawn shapes to some kind of List is becouse in app, the drawing occurs every screen update so I just want to modify canvas and dont remember anything.
Thanks for every answer.
As far as I know, android doesn't support something like that. Android uses double-buffering which means 2 alternatives "screens" that alternate each other so if you draw on one the next would be on random state.
There are tricks you can use to achieve what you want like draw both screens and then stop drawing, but android doesn't support such behavior because when you get hold of a canvas it's not certain that it returned exactly as what you did last frame, it doesn't specify what could cause an error, but if you ask me it could be anything that pops up on screen.
You don't really need an engine to do that, you can use a SurfaceView and draw on it (it supports shapes like the ones you want)
I want to make brushes displayed in below image for drawing application. Which is a suitable method - Open GL or Canvas & How can we implement it?
I'd say Canvas, as you'll want to modify an image. OpenGLES is good for displaying images, but does not (as far as I know) have methods for modifying its textures (unless you render to a texture that then render to screen with some modifications, which is not always so effective).
Using the Canvas you will have the methods for drawing your brush-strokes onto the Bitmap you're painting on, in GLES you would have to modify a texture (by using a canvas) and then upload that to the GPU again, before it could be rendered, and the rendering would most likely just consist of drawing a square with your texture on it (as the fillrate for most mobile GPUs are quite bad, you don't want to draw the strokes separately).
What I'm trying to say is; The most convenient way to let the user draw on an openGLES surface would be by creating a texture by drawing on a Canvas.
But, there might still be some gain in using GL for drawing, as the Canvas-operations can be performed off-screen, and you can push this data to a gl-renderer to (possibly) speed up the on-screen drawing.
However; if you are developing for Android 3.x+ you should take a look at RenderScript, (which I personally have never had a chance to use), but seems like it would be a good solution in this case.
Your best solution is going to be using native code. That's how Sketchbook does it. You could probably figure out how by browsing through the GIMP source code http://www.gimp.org/source . Out of Canvas vs OpenGL, Canvas would be the way to go.
It depends. if you want to edit the image statically, go with canvas. But if you want after brushing the screen, to have the ability to edit, scale, rotate, it would be easier with opengl.
An example with opengl: Store the motion the user do with touchs. create a class that store a motion and have fields for size, rotation etc. to draw this class, just make a path of the brush image selected following the stored motion.
I have a drawing app where the user can draw lines with their finger, adjust the color, thickness, etc. As the user is drawing, I am converting the massed X/Y points from MotionEvent into SVG Paths, as well as creating Android Path's and then drawing the Android Path's to the screen via a Canvas, and committing the SVG Path's to the app's database.
I am following the model used in FingerPaint, in that the 'in progress' lines are drawn on the fly by repeated calls to invalidate() (and thus, onDraw()), and once the line is complete and a new line is started, the previous line(s) are drawn in onDraw() from the underlying Canvas Bitmap, with in progress lines again generating repeated re-draws.
This works fine in this application - until you start rotating the underlying Bitmap to compensate for device rotation, supporting the ability to 'zoom in' on the drawing surface and thus having to scale the underlying Bitmap, etc. So for example, with the device rotated and the drawing scaled in, when the user is drawing, we need to scale AND rotate our Bitmap in onDraw(), and this is absolutely crawling.
I've looked at a SurfaceView, but as this still uses the same Canvas mechanism, I'm not sure I'll see noticeable improvement... so my thoughts turn to OpenGL. I have read somewhere that OpenGL can do rotations and scaling essentially 'for free', and even seen rumors (third comment) that Canvas may be disappearing in future versions.
Essentially, I am a little stuck between the Canvas and OpenGL solutions... I have a 2D drawing app that seems to fit the Canvas model perfectly when in one state, as there are not constant re-draws going on like a game (for instance when the user is not drawing I don't need any re-drawing), but when the user IS drawing, I need the maximum performance necessary to do some increasingly complex things with the surface...
Would welcome any thoughts, pointers and suggestions.
OpenGL would be able to handle the rotations and scaling easily.
Honestly, you would probably need to learn a lot of OpenGL to do this, specifically related to the topics of:
Geometry
Lighting (or just disabling it)
Picking (selecting geometry to draw on it)
Pixel Maps
Texture Mapping
Mipmapping
Also, learning OpenGL for this might be overkill, and you would have to be pretty good at it to make it efficient.
Instead, I would recommend using the graphic components of a game library built on top of openGL, such as:
Cocos2d
libgdx
any of the engines listed here
Well, this question was asked 6 years ago. Maybe Android 4.0 has not come up?
Actually, after Android 4.0 the Canvas at android.view.View is a hardware accelerated canvas, which means it is implementd by OpenGL, so you do not need to use another way for performance.
You can see the https://github.com/ChillingVan/android-openGL-canvas/blob/master/canvasglsample/src/main/java/com/chillingvan/canvasglsample/comparePerformance/ComparePerformanceActivity.java to compare the performance of normal canvas in view with GLSurfaceView.
You are right that SurfaceView uses Canvas underneath the hood. The main difference is that SurfaceView uses another thread to do the actual drawing, which generally improves performance. It sounds like it would not help you a great deal, though.
You are correct that OpenGL can do rotations very quickly, so if you need more performance that is the way to go. You should probably use GLSurfaceView. The main drawback with using OpenGL is that it is a real pain to do text. Basically you have to (okay, don't have to, but seems to be the best option) render bitmaps of text.
I am developing a 2d sprite-based game with a bunch of animations. Developed with separate threads and in general everything is great.
I recently added a level that has a alpha PNG graphic drawn over the Canvas after the rest of the animated bitmaps have been drawn.
There is now a noticeable speed degradation on this level and it seems to sputter etc... to top it off I just added a Multiply Xfermode to the paint for the graphic and it went to a stand-still.
Is there a better way to overlay graphics in this fashion to avoid the hit in performance (I'm assuming it has to calculate the alpha channels and it apply it to the canvas bitmap)? Is there an alternative to drawing the overlay with a drawbitmap/png?
To get better performance you could put your overlay in another window, either by using WindowManager.addView or by using a PoupWindow. The composition will then be done on the GPU.
I'm trying to draw circles using SurfaceView and I was curious about whether or not you always use canvas when you draw something. Are there are other ways instead of using canvas, and what are the pros/cons? Also, how would you personally draw a circle with SurfaceView?
There are two basic options: use a Canvas, or OpenGL ES.
The easiest way to draw a circle is to use Canvas#drawCircle(). Doing the equivalent with OpenGL ES is more involved, though there are various toolkits that can simplify things.
Depending on your needs, you may want to consider using a custom View instead. Canvas rendering on a SurfaceView is not hardware accelerated, but Canvas rendering on a custom View can be.
I think there is no other ways to draw instead of canvas.
You can use SurfaceView to draw any shape even a cricle also.
First you ahev to get SurfaceHolder object and using that you can draw anything.
Yo can follow these links- first second