Using glLoadMatrixd on specific vertices? - c

I am trying to do skeletal animation in legacy OpenGL and thought I could use matrices on individual vertices. When I programmed it and it didn't work, I did some Googling to find this: https://www.talisman.org/opengl-1.1/Reference/glLoadMatrix.html
GL_INVALID_OPERATION is generated if glLoadMatrix is executed between the execution of glBegin and the corresponding execution of glEnd.
So now I'm stumped. Here is a diagram:
Bones are labeled in red. I'm trying to do skeletal animation so there are two rectangles. One uses Bone 0 and the second uses Bone 1. Only specific vertices of the triangles that make the second rectangle use the rotation matrix of Bone 1, and the ones that don't use the rotation matrix of Bone 0, kind of making a snake, if that makes sense.
Since I cannot use glLoadMatrix for individual vertices in a triangle, what other way can I displace a vertex based on a stored matrix? Perhaps multiply some of the matrix values to the vertex? Not sure how to go about doing that. Any input is appreciated, thanks!

You mention the two rectangles Bone0 and Bone1. You need to draw them separately since they need to have separate transformation matrices. Two points of the two rectangles are coincident, your transformation matrix to draw Bone1 must ensure that:
glTranslateF(...);
glRotateF(...); /* position rectangle Bone0 */
glBegin(GL_QUADS); /* draw rectangle Bone0 */
glVertex3f(...); /* draw it */
...
glEnd();
glPushMatrix(); /* save transformation matrix */
glMulMatrix(...); /*
* as per your drawing, this is not just a
* simple translate/rotate operation, but
* a translate/shear
* you need to do that manually
*/
glBegin(GL_QUADS); /*
* draw rectangle Bone1. Two of the vertices are
* coincident with two of rectangle Bone0. Your
* shear matrix must ensure they are
*/
glVertex3F(...);
glEnd();

What you're trying to do is called skinning! And unfortunately it will involve a bit more effort than your approach. It is possible to do it between one begin and end, which is generally preferable.
The easiest way is not to use OpenGL to transform your vertices. Use your favourite matrix math library to multiply the vertices with your bone matrices before they get passed to OpenGL. If the number of vertices is not too large, it won't slow you down much.
The harder way is to implement a skinning shader. This book chapter provides a good introduction on how that is done. The principle is to upload multiple matrices to OpenGL, and give each vertex an index which says which matrix to multiply with. This will be much faster than the easy approach.
GPUs are fast because they are optimized for doing the same operation on a large set of data - the tradeoff for this is that you can't modify the state (such as changing the matrix) while a draw call is in progress.

Heh, have been doing a lot of math stuff since I posted my question and checked back just now to post an answer for anyone with the same question, and I noticed I already have some answers, so thanks for answering with your input!
Since I have figured out a solution, though, I thought I would post an answer along with these other two.
Basically, what I am doing with the rendering is per-vertex rendering anyway, where it reads the vertices of each triangle from a data buffer and all of that, so it wasn't too much trouble to go ahead and write a custom function to multiply a matrix to a vertex, so a copy of the vertex is loaded from the buffer, the matrix is multiplied to it based on which bone the vertex is mapped to, and then that is used for rendering that particular vertex on the triangle.
Funny that I already had implemented what #Hannesh suggested and I just had to write the multiplier function. Very cool!
The harder way is to implement a skinning shader. This book chapter provides a good introduction on how that is done. The principle is to upload multiple matrices to OpenGL, and give each vertex an index which says which matrix to multiply with. This will be much faster than the easy approach.
Thanks again! I'll up-vote whenever I have the reputation to do so!

Related

Using Matrix Multiplication to Rotate a cube in opengl

I have some code that draws a cube. I've managed to rotate the cube using glRotatef but I need to be able to rotate the cube using only matrix multiplication. I know what matrices to use but I'm not sure how to apply them to the vertices of the cube. Is there a way to pass a vector to glVertex3f? Or a way to pass an array of vertices?
I agree completely with Drew's answer. However, I figured I'd point you in the direction of a nicely-written tutorial series that shows these concepts in action:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming
Start with the first 3 tutorials to learn shader basics, and then the 4th and 5th tutorials dive into rotation with triangles and cubes. Also, the examples use FreeGLUT, which is a framework that allows you to easily interact with your code using key presses, mouse movements, mouse presses, and more.
The OpenGL functions you're using are for immediate-mode rendering, and the vertex transformations are done within OpenGL. If you want to manually transform the vertices outside of OpenGL, you'll have to either implement matrix * vector multiplication, or use a library that does this for you.
As a side note, if you're just interested in rotation, you may find Rodrigues' rotation formula easier to implement than general matrix transformation.

Simple Flat Plane Tessellation Shader

Part 1:
So I want to create a basic tessellation program that takes a plane of quads and transforms it into a more, well, detailed/tessellated plane of quads. Such as the picture below. How much it gets tessellated would depend on user controls, passed in by a uniform (initially). However I am so new to tessellation shaders that I can't even figure out how to do this.
How is this typically done? Surely you shouldn't actually draw the plane of quads prior to the shader program, since from my understanding quads won't get tessellated this way, instead the get tessellated into a way like the below picture:
I believe the answer could to be to draw a plane of points, and these points are then tessellated into more points, and these points are transformed into quads of the appropriate size in the geometry shader I think? Alternatively, instead of converting points into quads could I just draw quads between each four closest points (that would be much better)? Examples very much appreciated!
NOTE: Using GLSL > 4.0 & C only (No C++/Python)
Part 2:
After I get part 1 working, how would I make it so that certain quads are more tessellated than others, such as this?:
I want the parts closer to the camera to be more tessellated.
Part 3:
If I were able to get that far, the next part would be to alter the z-axis of points to make the plane into an interesting environment. This would be done by reading in a 2Dsampler, I know how to do that and all. However, if I am correct in Part 1 about using a plane of points then I need to do more than just alter the points that are converted into quads, because quads need to be sharing vertices essentially in order there to be no gaps between quads. How would that be done? Alternatively if we draw quads between points, with each point being the appriate height, then this wouldn't be a issue.
Part 1
Yes you're correct: generate a 'patch' as a simple grid of points, specify the tesselation levels as uniforms into the TCS (tesselation control shader) and generate the vertex data in the TES (tesselation evaluation shader).
Sounds complicated? Here's a nice tutorial I based my work on: http://antongerdelan.net/opengl/tessellation.html
Part 2
What you are talking about here is LOD (or level of detail). You would need to tesselate and render the higher polygon-count bottom-left corner of your mesh as a separate object.
Your suggested approach is correct: break the overall scene into 'chunks' and determine the LOD (i.e. the tesselation parameters) for each chunk separately, usually by some distance-to-camera algorithm.
Part 3
Another excellent tutorial which does exactly what you are after I believe: http://codeflow.org/entries/2010/nov/07/opengl-4-tessellation/
I used this approach to get a very highly detailed but memory and frame efficient terrain.
Hope this helps.

Occlusion culling 3D transformed 2D rectangles?

So, to start off, I'm not very good at computer graphics. I'm trying to implement a GUI toolkit where one of the features is being able to apply 3D transformations to 2D "layers". (a layer only has one Z coordinate, as pre-transform, it's a two dimensional axis aligned rectangle)
Now, this is pretty straightforward, until you come to 3D transformations that would push the layer back, requiring splitting the layer into several polygons in order to render it correctly, as illustrated here. And because we can have transparency, layers may not get completely occluded, while still requiring getting split.
So here is an illustration depicting the issue and the desired outcome. In this scenario, the blue layer (call it B) is on top of the red layer (R), while having the same Z position (but B was added after R). In this scenario, if we rotate B, its top two points will get a Z index lower than 0 while the bottom points will get an index higher than 0 (with the anchor point being the only point/line left as 0).
Can somebody suggest a good way of doing this on the CPU? I've struggled to find a suitable algorithm implementation (in C++ or C) that would be appropriate to this scenario.
Edit: To clarify myself, at this stage in the pipeline, there is no rendering yet. We just need to produce a set of polygons for each layer that would then represent the layer's transformed and occluded geometry. Then, if required, rendering (either software or hardware) is done if required, which is not always the case (for example, when doing hit testing).
Edit 2: I looked at binary space partitioning as an option of achieving this but I have only been able to find one implementation (in GL2PS), which I'm not sure how to use. I do have a vague understanding of how BSPs work, but I'm not sure how they can be used for occlusion culling.
Edit 3: I'm not trying to do colour and transparency blending at this stage. Just pure geometry. Transparency can be handled by the renderer, and overdraw is okay. In this case, the blue polygon can just be drawn under the red one, but with more complicated cases, depth sorting or even splitting up the polygons may be required (example of a scary case like that below). Although the viewport is fixed, because all layers can be transformed in 3D, creating a shape shown below is possible.
So what I'm really looking for is an algorithm that would geometrically split layer B into two blue shapes, one of which would be drawn "above" and one of which would be drawn below R. The part "below" would get overdraw, yes, but it's not a major issue. So B just need to be split into two polygons so it would appear to cut through R when those polygons are drawn in order. No need to worry about blending.
Edit 4: For the purpose of this, we cannot render anything at all. This all has to be done purely geometrically (producing 2D polygons). This is what I was originally getting at.
Edit 5: I should note that the overall number of quads per subscene is around 30 (average). Definitely won't go above 100. Unless the layers are 3D transformed (which is where this problem arises), they are just radix sorted by Z positions before being drawn. Layers with the same Z position are drawn in order in which they were added (first in, first out).
Sorry if I didn't make it clear in the original question.
If you "aren't good with computer graphics", Doing it on CPU (software rendering) will be extremely difficult for you, if polygons can be transparent.
The easiest way to do it is to use GPU rendering (OpenGL/Direct3D) with Depth Peeling technique.
Cpu solutions:
Soltuion #1 (extremely difficult):
(I forgot the name of this algorithm).
You need to split polygon B into two, - for example, using polygon A as clip plane, then render result using painter's algorithm.
To do that you'll need to change your rendering routines so they'll no longer use quads, but textured polygons, plus you'll have to write/debug clipping routines that'll split triangles present in scene in such way that they'll no longer break paitner's algorithm.
Big Problem: If you have many polygons, this solution can potentially split scene into infinite number of triangles. Also, writing texture rendering code yourself isn't much fun, so it is advised to use OpenGL/Direct3D.
This can be extremely difficult to get right. I think this method was discussed in "Computer Graphics Using OpenGL 2nd edition" by "Francis S. Hill" - somewhere in one of their excercises.
Also check wikipedia article on Hidden Surface Removal.
Solution #2 (simpler):
You need to implement multi-layered z-buffer that stores up to N transparent pixels and their depth.
Solution #3 (computationally expensive):
Just use ray-tracing. You'll get perfect rendering result (no limitations of depth peeling and cpu solution #2), but it'll be computationally expensive, so you'll need to optimize rendering routines a lot.
Bottom line:
If you're performing software rendering, use Solution #2 or #3. If you're rendering on hardware, use technique similar to depth-peeling, or implement raytracing on hardware.
--edit-1--
required knowledge for implementing #1 and #2 is "line-plane intersection". If you understand how to split line (in 3d space) into two using a plane, you can implement raytracing or clipping easily.
Required knowledge for #2 is "textured 3d triangle rendering" (algorithm). It is a fairly complex topic.
In order to implement GPU solution, you need to be able to find few OpenGL tutorials that deal with shaders.
--edit-2--
Transparency is relevant, because in order to get transparency right, you need to draw polygons from back to front (from farthest to closest) using painter's algorithms. Sorting polygons properly is impossible in certain situation, so they must be split, or you should use one of the listed techniques, otherwise in certain situations there will be artifacts/incorrectly rendered images.
If there's no transparency, you can implement standard zbuffer or draw using hardware OpenGL, which is a very trivial task.
--edit-3--
I should note that the overall number of quads per subscene is around 30 (average). Definitely won't go above 100.
If you will split polygons, it can easily go way above 100.
It might be possible to position polygons in such way that each polygon will split all others polygon.
Now, 2^29 is 536870912, however, it is not possible to split one surface with a plane in such way that during each split number of polygons would double. If one polygon is split 29 timse, you'll get 30 polygons in the best-case scenario, and probably several thousands in the worst case if splitting planes aren't parallel.
Here's rough algorithm outline that should work:
Prepare list of all triangles in scene.
Remove back-facing triangles.
Find all triangles that intersect each other in 3d space, and split them using line of intersection.
compute screen-space coordinates for all vertices of all triangles.
Sort by depth for painter's algorithm.
Prepare extra list for new primitives.
Find triangles that overlap in 2D (post projection) screen space.
For all overlapping triangles check their rendering order. Basically a triangle that is going to be rendered "below" another triangles should have no part that is above another triangle.
8.1. To do that, use camera origin point and triangle edges to split original triangles into several sub-regions, then check if regions conform to established sort order (prepared for painter's algorithm). Regions are created by splitting existing pair of triangles using 6 clip planes created by camera origin points and triangle edges.
8.2. If all regions conform to rendering order, leave triangles be. If they don't, remove triangles from list, and add them to the "new primitives" list.
IF there are any primitives in new primitives list, merge the list with triangle list, and go to #5.
By looking at that algorithm, you can easily understand why everybody uses Z-buffer nowadays.
Come to think about it, that's a good training exercise for universities that specialize in CG. The kind of exercise that might make your students hate you.
I am going to come out say give the simpler solution, which may not fit your problem. Why not just change your artwork to prevent this problem from occuring.
In problem 1, just divide the polys in Maya or whatever beforehand. For the 3 lines problem, again, divide your polys at the intersections to prevent fighting. Pre-computed solutions will always run faster than on the fly ones - especially on limited hardware. From profesional experience, I can say that it also does scale, well it scales ok. It just requires some tweaking from the art side and technical reviews to make sure nothing is created "ilegally." You may end up getting more polys doing it this way than rendering on the fly, but at least you won't have to do a ton of math on CPUs that may not be up to the task.
If you do not have control over the artwork pipeline, this won't work as writing some sort of a converter would take longer than getting a BSP sub-division routine up and running. Still, KISS is often the best solution.

does glRotate in OpenGL rotate the camera or rotate the world axis or rotate the model object?

I want to know whether glRotate rotates the camera, the world axis, or the object. Explain how they are different with examples.
the camera
There is no camera in OpenGL.
the world axis
There is no world in OpenGL.
or the object.
There are no objects in OpenGL.
Confused?
OpenGL is a drawing system, that operates with points, lines and triangles. There is no concept of a scene or a world in OpenGL. All there is are vertices of which each has a set of attributes and there is the state of OpenGL which determines how vertices are turned into pixels.
The very first stage of this process is getting the vertex positions within the viewport. In the fixed function pipeline (i.e. without shaders), to get those, each vertex position if first multiplied with the so called "modelview" matrix, the intermediary result is used for lighting calculations and then multiplied with the "projection" matrix. After that clipping and then normalization into viewport coordinates are applied.
Those two matrices I mentioned save two purposes. The first one "modelview" is used to apply some transformation on the incoming vertices so that those end up in the desired spot relative to the origin. There is no difference in first moving geometry to some place in the world, and then moving the viewpoint within the world. Or keeping the viewpoint at the origin and move the whole world in the opposite. All this can be described by the modelview matrix.
The second one "projection" works together with the normalization process to behave like a kind of "lens", so to speak. With this you set the field of view (and a few other parameters, like shift, which you need for certain applications – don't worry about it).
The interesting thing about matrices is, that they're non-commutative, i.e. for two given matrices N, M
M * N =/= N * M ; for most M, N
This ultimately means, that you can compose a series of transformations A, B, C, D... into one single compound transformation matrix T by multiplying the primitive transformations onto each other in the right order.
The OpenGL matrix manipulation functions (they're obsolete BTW), do just that. You have a matrix selected for manipulation (the matrix mode) for example the modelview M. Then glRotate effectively does this:
M *= R(angle,axis)
i.e. the active matrix gets multiplied on a rotation matrix constructed from the given parameters. Similar for scale and translate.
If this happens to appear to behave like a camera or placing a object depends entirely on how and in which order those manipulations are combined.
But for OpenGL there are just numbers/vectors (vertex attributes), which somehow translate into 2-dimensional viewport coordinates, that get drawn as points for filled inbetween as line or a triangle.
glRotate works on the current matrix. So it depend if the matrix is the camera one or a world trasformation one. To know more about the current matrix have a look at glMatrixMode().
Finding example is just googling: I found this one that in order to me should help you to figure out what's happening.

Rectangle matrix calculations in OpenCV

I had a generalized question to find out if it was possible or not to do matrix calculations on a rectangle. I have a CvRect that has information stored in it with coordinates and I have a cvMat that has transformational data. What I would like to know is if there was a way to get the Rect to use the matrix data to generate a rotated, skewed, and repositioned rectangle out of it. I've searched online, but I was only able to get information on image transforms.
Thanks in advance for the help.
No, this is not possible. cv::Rect is also not capable of that, as it only describes rectangles in a Manhattan world. There is cv::RotatedRect, but this also does not handle skewing.
You can, however, feed the corner points of your rectangle to cv::transform:
http://opencv.itseez.com/modules/core/doc/operations_on_arrays.html?highlight=transform#cv2.transform
You will then obtain four points that are transformed accordingly. Note that there are also more specialized versions of this function, e.g. warpPerspective() and warpAffine().

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