How can one create smooth edged spotlights in OpenGL? - java

I am currently working on implementing lighting to my project with OpenGL. Still working on the basic implementation (getting lights to display correctly) and I encountered a weird problem. When trying to create a spotlight with a cutoff (limited angle affected by the light) I get very hard edges, almost like stairs, as seen in this picture:
There is no ambient light (using glLightModel(GL_LIGHT_MODEL_AMBIENT, colorToFloatBuffer(new Color(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f)))) and I also disabled spot exponent (specifies how the light is distributed in the cone) and all attenuations to make the effect clearer and the background is a big white image (made black by the lack of ambient light; I am also wondering why I even need ot use an image at all in order to see the light).
Here is how I set up the light:
glEnable(GL_LIGHTING);
glEnable(GL_COLOR_MATERIAL);
glLight(glLightID, GL_AMBIENT, colorToFloatBuffer(Color.blue));
glLight(glLightID, GL_DIFFUSE, colorToFloatBuffer(Color.black));
glLight(glLightID, GL_SPECULAR, colorToFloatBuffer(Color.black));
glLight(glLightID, GL_POSITION, floatBuffer.put(position.x).put(position.y).put(0.0f).put(1.0f));
glLight(glLightID, GL_SPOT_DIRECTION, otherFloatBuffer.put(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f));
glLightf(glLightID, GL_SPOT_EXPONENT, 0);
glLightf(glLightID, GL_SPOT_CUTOFF, 22.5f);
glLightf(glLightID, GL_CONSTANT_ATTENUATION, 1.0f);
glLightf(glLightID, GL_LINEAR_ATTENUATION, 0.0f);
glLightf(glLightID, GL_QUADRATIC_ATTENUATION, 0.0f);
On a different note, I also scale the context before applying any of these effects (I use perspective view for some visual effects and yet want to maintain orthographic coordinates), if that is any help.

There are to ways you can achieve that:
Continue using per-vertex lighting. You, however, should increase the resolution of your scene - put more polygons inside!
Change to per-pixel lighting. You will need to learn shader programs. Here are some tutorials on the topic.

Related

Texture repeating on quads OpenGL

I am writing a voxel engine and at the moment
I am working on the Chunk-Rendering-System but I have a problem.
It seems that the textures were repeated on the quads.
There is this green line at the bottom of the grass blocks and I don't know why.
This is the OpenGL-Render-Code:
Texture texture = TextureManager.getTexture(block.getTextureNameForSide(Direction.UP));
texture.bind();
GL11.glBegin(GL11.GL_QUADS);
GL11.glTexCoord2d(0, 0); GL11.glVertex3f(0, 1, 0);
GL11.glTexCoord2d(1, 0); GL11.glVertex3f(0, 1, 1);
GL11.glTexCoord2d(1, 1); GL11.glVertex3f(1, 1, 1);
GL11.glTexCoord2d(0, 1); GL11.glVertex3f(1, 1, 0);
GL11.glEnd();
And here is the OpenGL-Setup:
GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_TEXTURE_2D);
GL11.glShadeModel(GL11.GL_SMOOTH);
GL11.glClearColor(0.1F, 0.4F, 0.6F, 0F);
GL11.glClearDepth(1F);
GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_DEPTH_TEST);
GL11.glDepthFunc(GL11.GL_LEQUAL);
GL11.glHint(GL11.GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL11.GL_NICEST);
GL11.glCullFace(GL11.GL_BACK);
GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_CULL_FACE);
Make sure GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S and GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T are set to GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE.
genpfault's answer should do the trick for you, I just wanted to give you some insight into why you need this particular wrap state.
To be clear, the green line in your screenshot corresponds to the edges of one of your voxels?
It looks like you are using GL_LINEAR filtering (default) together with an inappropriate texture wrap state (e.g. GL_REPEAT or GL_CLAMP). I will explain why GL_CLAMP is a bad idea later.
You may think that the texture coordinate 0.0 and 1.0 are perfectly within the normalized texture coordinate range and therefore not subject to wrapping, but you would be wrong.
This particular combination of states will pickup texels from the other side of your texture at either extreme of the [0,1] texture coordinate range. The texture coordinate 1.0 is actually slightly beyond the center of the last texel in your texture, so when GL fetches the 4 nearest texels for linear filtering, it wraps around to the other side of the texture for at least 2 of them.
GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE modifies this behavior, it clamps the texture coordinates to a range that is actually more restrictive than [0,1] so that no coordinate goes beyond the center of any edge texels in your texture. Linear filtering will not pickup texels from the other side of your texture with this set. You could also (mostly) fix this by using GL_NEAREST filtering, but that will result in a lot of texture aliasing.
It is also possible that you are using GL_CLAMP, which, by the way was removed in OpenGL 3.1. In older versions of GL it was designed to clamp the coordinates into the range [0,1] and then if linear filtering tried to fetch a texel beyond the edge it would use a special set of border texels rather than wrapping around. Border texels are no longer supported, and thus that wrap mode is gone.
The bottom line is do not use GL_CLAMP, it does not do what most people think. GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE is almost always what you really want when you think of clamping textures.
EDIT:
genpfault brings up a good point; this would be a lot easier to understand with a diagram...
The following diagram illustrates the problem in 1 dimension:
   http://i.msdn.microsoft.com/dynimg/IC83860.gif
I have a more thorough explanation of this diagram in an answer I wrote to a similar issue.

Alpha blending / transperency of a texture bound to quad - java lwjgl slick

I need someone to help me with this. I can't really figure out how the alpha channel or blending works. The Image is in .bmp format, it loads perfectly.
But I want a specific color to be transparent, in paint that color is R255xG0xB255.
I've been searching for similar topics, but everything I found or tried just seems to mess stuff up, like give me a full black screen or make everything have a magenta touch...
Everything else works just fine with my code... Should I maybe switch to .png? could that solve the issue? does it have any pros or cons if I use png or bmp?
// Initialization Code OpenGL
glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
glLoadIdentity();
glOrtho(0, HEIGHT, WIDTH, 0, 1, -1);
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
glClearColor(1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);
glEnable(GL_BLEND);
glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
while (!Display.isCloseRequested()) {
// Render
glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
this.drawMapToScreen();
this.drawCreatureToScreen();
Display.update();
Display.sync(60);
}
Display.destroy();
}
private void drawCreatureToScreen() {
Texture tex3 = SpriteLoader.loadTexture("player");
Color.magenta.bind();
tex3.bind();
glBegin(GL_QUADS);
glTexCoord2f(0, 0);
glVertex2i((HEIGHT-32)/2,(WIDTH-32)/2);
glTexCoord2f(1, 0);
glVertex2i((HEIGHT-32)/2 +32,(WIDTH-32)/2);
glTexCoord2f(1, 1);
glVertex2i((HEIGHT-32)/2 +32,(WIDTH-32)/2 +32);
glTexCoord2f(0, 1);
glVertex2i((HEIGHT-32)/2,(WIDTH-32)/2 +32);
glEnd();
}
What are looking to do is that when your color is 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f (in the eyes of OpenGL: full red, no green, full blue) have the alpha (transparency) channel be zero, so that the pixel is drawn completely transparent. Unfortunately, there is no way to do this in OpenGL, unless you use shaders, and believe me using shaders is far messier than the solution I propose: doing "pre-multiplied alpha" in your image editor. What this means: it doesn't depend on which format you use - .png or .bmp are both fine, and they both support an alpha channel. Alpha is transparency; in OpenGL, you'll be dealing with floats a lot, so I'll use floats here. Alpha is the fourth color channel; we have Red, Green, Blue, and then Alpha. Alpha controls transparency (as a float) by being multiplied by the other channels: if alpha is 0.0f, then that color is fully transparent, but if alpha is 1.0f, it is fully opaque. To sum up: In your editor, you must make sure that the area you want transparent is transparent in the editor. For alpha blending, which still must be enabled for any transparency whatsoever: the generally preferred blend mode is as follows:
glEnable(GL_BLEND);
glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
Now, blending is a technique for making objects appear transparent, among other things. In your case, you'll want to use the blend function above: use glDisable(GL_BLEND) to disable blending from occurring after enabling it. The blend function above essentially mixes the preexisting colors and colors to be rendered in such a way that an object rendered overlapping another, after said other, makes it appear that the "top" and most recently rendered object is transparent relative to the "bottom" object.
TL;DR:
Make sure the area you want transparent is transparent in your image editor. OpenGL cannot make specific colors have alpha values of 0.0f unless you use a needlessly complex shader.
Use the blending setup glEnable(GL_BLEND); glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); to enable blending. Make sure the top object is rendered after the bottom object.

LWJGL: Discolored Textures

So I am developing a small Pong replica simply for some practice with LWJGL. Since there is no easy way to write customizable text in LWJGL, I am using textures for the start button, other buttons, and so on. However, when I drew the texture, it turned out to be discolored on my purple background. If I change the background to white, there is no discoloration. Help?
Also, my start button texture is something like 50x22, but I put it on a 64x64 image because Slick can only load resolutions that are an exponent of two. I adjusted the rectangle being drawn so that it is not warped, and the rest of the image is transparent, so it shouldn't be visible once I sort out the above problem. Are there any alternatives to my method?
This is where I initialize my OpenGL stuff:
public static void setCamera()
{
glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
glLoadIdentity();
glOrtho(0,width,0,height,-1,1);
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glLoadIdentity();
}
And this is where I draw the texture:
public void draw()
{
logic();
glPushMatrix();
glTranslated(x,y,0);
texture.bind();
glBegin(GL_QUADS);
glTexCoord2d(0,1); glVertex2d(0,-196.875);
glTexCoord2d(1,1); glVertex2d(width+18.75,-196.875);
glTexCoord2d(1,0); glVertex2d(width+18.75,height);
glTexCoord2d(0,0); glVertex2d(0,height);
glEnd();
glPopMatrix();
}
Thanks :)
As discussed in comments, your initial problem was that you had neglected to reset the "current color" before drawing your texture. GL is a glorified state machine, it will continue to use the color you set for every other draw operation... so setting glColor3d (...) when you drew your background also affects your foreground image.
Adding the following before drawing your textured quad will fix this problem:
glColor3f (1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f);
However, you have brought up a new issue in your comments related to blending. This question boils down to a lack of a blending function. By default when you draw something in OpenGL it will merely overwrite anything else in the framebuffer.
What you need for transparency to work is enable blending and use this function:
glBlendFunc (GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
This effectively does the following:
NewColor = (NewColor.RGB * NewColor.A) + OldColor.RGB * (1.0 - NewColor.A)
With this, the parts of your texture that have an alpha value != 1.0 will be a mix of whatever was already in the framebuffer and what you just drew.
Remember to enable blending before you draw your transparent objects:
glEnable (GL_BLEND);
and disable it when you do not need it:
glDisable (GL_BLEND);
Lastly, you should be aware that the order you draw translucent objects in OpenGL is pretty important. Opaque objects (such as your background) need to be drawn first. In general, you need to draw things from back-to-front in order for alpha blending to function correctly. This is the opposite order you would ideally want for opaque geometry (since hardware can skip shading for obstructed objects if you draw objects in front of them first).

JOGL - translate GL_QUADS

In JOGL im trying to create a few 3D shapes using GL_QUADS (i.e. different components of a whole object) and so far its been fine to do this but I cant figure out how to translate the shape, there must be a way to do this but im not very familiar with GL_QUADS so im not entirely sure how to go about this. Editing gl.glVertex3f just results in the shape being a different size which seems to be the only thing I can edit, is it possible to give a GL_QUAD a variable name?
You can use the glTranslatef function:
// render the shape
gl.glTranslatef(5.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); // translate along x, y, z
// render the shape - you will now have two shapes next to each other
Calling gl.glTranslatef(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); will apply to the current matrix in the stack, effectively meaning that whatever you draw from then on will appear 1 unit along on the x axis from whatever the matrix was on before (probably the origin in your case).
I can see why it might seem confusing, rather than creating the shape then moving it (can't be done, it's already been drawn), you'll want to translate then draw your shape.
For example:
gl.glPushMatrix();
gl.glTranslatef(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);
gl.glBegin(GL2.GL_QUADS);
// draw some vertices here
gl.glEnd();
gl.glPopMatrix();

OpenGL-ES finding the right coordinates (Translations etc...)

How can I correctly figure out what values I must use for gl.glTranslatef(x,y,z), and similar methods. Example: I've got an square, and want to display it in the upper left corner, at about 1/4th of the screen. I figured it would be glTranslate() with values -0.5 and 0.5, but this doens't display where I expected it.
So basically I wan't to know how to find the right coordinates for objects in OpenGL-ES.
Unfortunately haven't developed opengl-es content for android yet, but AFAIK you need to convert screen coordinates (e.g. upper left corner on your screen) to world coordinates(coordinates in your 3D world in OpenGL).
For 3D you could do this would be through ray projection. You will find plenty of examples through google search and maybe a OpenGL implementation too.
For 2D you can get away bit using an orthogonal projection matrix(with no perspective distortion basically) and rotating it as needed (e.g. for lanscape mode):
// Initialize your projection matrix - current number are half the dimensions for the G1 I borrowed(320x480)
glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
glLoadIdentity();
glOrthof(-240.0f, 240.0f, -160.0f, 160.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f);
// Rotate everything by 90 degrees
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glLoadIdentity();
glRotatef(-90.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);
HTH

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