getting part of the (already rendered) screen as texture - android

I'm making an android opengl es 2d app, and trying to use a part of my rendered screen as a texture for a billboard.
so far, i had partial success with glCopyTexSubImage - it only works on some phones.
everywhere i read recommends using frameBufferObject to render to texture, but i can't grasp how to use it, so if anyone can help me get this, i would thank them greatly.
if i use a FBO that is binded to a texture, is it possible to render just part of the screen? if not, isn't that a bit overkill? (also much more work texture mapping and moving the texture. that and the texture would have to be big enough for the part i need to not be blurry)
i need to get a snapshot of something that should be rendered to screen anyway, does that mean i have to render my scene twice every frame(one for my texture and another for the actuall render)? am i missing something here?

Related

Dynamic Environment mapping from camera in Augmented Reality setting

I am trying to implement something like the technique described in this (old) paper to use the phone camera's video frames to create an illusion of environment mapping in an AR app.
I want to take the camera frame, divide it into sub-areas and then use those as faces on the cube map. The division of the camera frame would look something like this:
Now the X area is easy, I can use glCopyTexImage2D to copy that square area to my cubemap texture. But I need help with the trapezoid shaped areas around X (forget about the trianlges for now).
How can I take those trapezoidal areas and distort them into square textures? I think I need the opposite transformation of the later occurring perspective projection, so that the two will cancel each other out in the final render if I render the cubemap as a skybox around my camera (does that explain what I want?).
Before doing this I tried a simpler step of putting the square X area on every side of the cubemap just to see if glCopyTexImage2D can even be used for this. It can, but the results are not rotated right, some faces are "upside down" when I render the cubemap as a skybox. The question is similar: How can I rotate them before using them as textures?
I also thought about solving the problem from the other side and modifying the "texture coordinates" to make the necessary adjustments, but that also does not seem easy since the lookup in the fragment shader with "textureCube" is more complicated than a normal texture lookup.
Any ideas?
I'm trying to do this in my AR app on Android with OpenGL ES 2.0 but I guess more general OpenGL advice might also be useful.
Update
I have come to the conclusion that this is not worth pursuing anymore. The paper makes it look nice, but my experiments with a phone camera have shown a major contradiction. If you want to reflect the environment in an object rendered in AR, the camera view is very limited. When the camera is far away from the tracked object you have enough environment information for a good reflection, but you will barely see it because the camera is far away. But when you bring the camera closer to see the awesome reflection in detail, the tracked object will fill most of the camera's field of view and you barely have any environment to reflect anymore. So in either case you lose and the result is not worth the effort.
It seems that you need to create mesh with UV mapping described in article and render it with texture from camera to another texture. Then use it as cubemap.

Artifacts about rendering ajacent cubes with opengl es?

I was trying to render rubix cubes with opengl es on android. Here is how I do it: I render 27 ajacent cubes. And the faces of the cubes which is covered is textured with black bmp picture and other faces that can be seen is textured with colorful picture. I used cull face and depth-test to avoid rendering useless faces. But look at what I got, it is pretty wierd. The black faces show up sometimes. Can anyone tell me how to get rid of the artifacts?
Screenshots:
With the benefit of screenshots it looks like the depth buffering simply isn't having any effect — would it be safe to conclude that you render the side of the cube with the blue faces first, then the central section behind it, then the back face?
I'm slightly out of my depth with the Android stuff but I think the confusion is probably just that enabling the depth test within OpenGL isn't sufficient. You also have to ensure that a depth buffer is allocated.
Probably you have a call to setEGLConfigChooser that's disabling the depth buffer. There are a bunch of overloaded variants of that method but the single boolean version and the one that allows redSize, greenSize, etc to be specified give you explicit control over whether there's a depth buffer size. So you'll want to check those.
If you're creating your framebuffer explicitly then make sure you are attaching a depth renderbuffer.

SurfaceView with OpenGL ES

OpenGL ES 2.0 is implemented in a project that I have been working on with a couple shader components that define what a texture should look like after modifications from a Bitmap. The SurfaceView will only ever have a single image in it for my project.
While doing several different approaches and looking through code in the past 24 hours, just hoping for a quick response or two from the community. Not looking for solutions, I'll do that research.
It sounds as though since we are using shaders, that in order to do scaling and movements in the texture based on touch events, that I will have have to use the Matrix utilities and OpenGL translations or movements with the camera to get the same effect as what is currently done within an ImageView. Would this be the appropriate approach? Perhaps even modify the shader code so that I have some additional input variables?
I don't believe that I can use anything on the Android side that would get the same effect, such as modifying the canvas of the SurfaceView or altering dimensions of the UI in some other fashion that would achieve the same effect?
Thanks. Again, solutions for zooming and moving around aren't necessary, just trying to get a grasp on intermixing OpenGL and Android appropriately for the task.
Why does it seem that several elements in 1.0 are easier than 2.0; ease of use should improve between releases.
Yes. You will need to use an ortho projection and adjust the extents to zoom. See this link here. To pan, you can simply use a glTranslatef.
If you would like to do this entirely in the pixel shader, you can use the texture matrix stack with glScalef and glTranslatef.

Scrolling/zooming a scene in OpenGL and subdivision

We are to develop a scrolling/zooming scene in OpenGL ES on Android, very much like a level in Angry Birds but more like a level in World Of Goo. More like the latter as the world will not consist of repeated layers as featured in Angry Birds but of a large image. As the scene needs to scroll/zoom and therefore a lot of it will not be visible, I was wondering about the most efficient way to implement the rendering, focusing on the environment only (ie not the objects within the world but background layers).
We will be using an orthographic projection.
The first that comes to mind is creating a large 4 vertices rectangle at world size, which has the background texture mapped to it, and translate/scale this using glTranslatef / glScalef. However, I was wondering if the non visible area outside of the screens boundaries is still being rendered by OpenGL as it is not being culled (you would lose the visible area as well as there are only 4 vertices). Therefore, would it be more efficient to subdivide this rectangle, so non visible smaller rectangles can be culled?
Another option would be creating a 4 vertice rectangle that would fill the screen, then move the background by adjusting its texture coordinates. However, I guess we would run into problems when building bigger worlds, considering the texture size limit. It seems like a nice implementation for repeated backgrounds like AngryBirds has.
Maybe there is another way..?
If someone has an idea on how it might be done in AngryBirds / World of Goo, please share as I'd love to hear. They seem to have implemented a system that allows for the world to be moved and zoomed very (WorldOfGoo = VERY) smoothly.
This is probably your best bet for implementation.
In my experience, keeping a large texture in memory is very expensive on Android. I would get quite a few OutOfMemoryError exceptions for the background texture before I moved to tiling.
I think the biggest rendering bottleneck would be with memory transfer speeds and fill rate instead of any graphics computation.
Edit: Check out 53:28 of this presentation from Google I/O 2009.
You could split the background rectangle into smaller rectangles, so that OpenGL only renders the visible rectangles. You won't have a big ass rectangle with a big ass texture loaded but smallers rectangles with smaller textures that you could load/unload, depending on what is visible on screen...
Afaik there would be no performance drop due to large areas being rendered off-screen, subdividing and culling is normally done just to reduce vertex count, but you would actually be adding to it here.
Putting that aside for now; from the way you phrased the question I am unsure whether you have a large background texture or a small repeating one. If it is large, then you will need to subdivide because of texture size limitations anyway, so the question is moot! If it is small, then I would suggest the second method, fit a quad to the screen and move the background by changing the texture coordinates.
I feel like I may have missed something, though, as I am unsure why you mentioned the texture size limitation issue when talking about the the texture coordinate method and not the large quad method. Surely for both this is not a problem for repeating textures as you can use GL_REPEAT texture wrap mode...
But for both it is a problem for a single large texture unless you subdivide, which would make the texture coordinate tactic way more complicated than necessary. In this case subdividing the mesh along texture subdivisions would be best, and culling off-screen sections. Deciding which parts to cull should be trivial with this technique.
Cheers.

Options for offscreen rendering on Android with OpenGL ES 1.0?

I'm working on implementing picking for an OpenGL game I'm writing for android. It's using the "unique color" method of drawing each touchable object as a solid color that is unique to each object. The user input then reads glReadPixels() at the location of the touch. I've gotten the coloring working, and glReadPixels working, but I have been unable to separate the "color" rendering from the main actual rendering, which complicated the use of glReadPixels.
Supposedly the trick to working with this is to render the second scene (for input) into an offscreen buffer, but this seems to be a bit problematic. I've investigated using OpenGL ES1.1 FBO's to act as an offscreen buffer, but it seems my handset (Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant (2.2)) does not support FBO's. I'm at a loss for how to correctly render this scene (and run glReadPixels on it) without the user witnessing it.
Any ideas how offscreen rendering of this sort can be done?
if FBO is not supported, you can always resort to rendering to your normal back-buffer.
Typical usage would be:
Clear back-buffer
draw "color-as-id" objects
Clear back-buffer
draw normal
SwapBuffers
The second clear will make sure the picking code will not show up on the final image.

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