Small mistakes could be time-consuming to find out in GLSL shaders. But found a good way to figure out:
If the shader is not working after some change, check the code change in version control tools, compare line by line change, from which figure out what change broke the shader.
In this example, I deleted the left parenthesis, then the shader broke. But figured out immediately with the help of version control comparison:
Vertices in model space are composed in cartesian coordinates in 3D, where the domain of each dimension ranges from -1 to 1.
To convert sphere vertices from model space to UV space, a simple way is converting theta of a vertex in spherical space, and z value of the vertex in model space, to the UV space.
Theta can be calculated using:
float theta = acos(x / sqrt(x * x + y * y));
The range of the calculated theta is [0, PI], because positive and negative y values yield the same result when calculating the radius (denominator). Thus, to expand the theta to [0, 2PI], we just need to extend theta when y is negative:
if (y < 0.0) theta = 2PI – theta;
Now we can convert theta to u:
float u = theta / 2PI;
The result of u can be visualized in the red channel of the fragment. Looking from the top of the sphere, we get the following result:
v can be easily calculated by converting z from domain [-1, 1] to [0, 1]:
float v = 0.5 * (z + 1.0);
Visualize v in the blue channel of the fragment and looking at the sphere horizontally:
Given the polynomial coefficients of a 4 * 4 polynomial surface,
f(x,y) = p00 + p10*x + p01*y + p20*x^2 + p11*x*y + p02*y^2 + p30*x^3 + p21*x^2*y + p12*x*y^2 + p03*y^3 + p40*x^4 + p31*x^3*y + p22*x^2*y^2 + p13*x*y^3 + p04*y^4
how to conveniently compute f(x, y) in a shader?
If we just do a multiplication of 2 vectors each consists of 15 elements, it’s easy to make mistakes when composing the vectors. So I did a practice to use matrix to represent the equation for a 2 * 2 polynomial:
f(x,y) = p00 + p10*x + p01*y + p20*x^2 + p11*x*y + p02*y^2 =
Much cleaner right? Now we can use a generic matrix to represent a n * n polynomial:
f(x, y) = YPX,
where P is a (n + 1) * (n + 1) matrix of the coefficients:
P = [p_00, p_10, p_20, ............., p_n0
p_01, p_11, p_21, ......, p_(n-1)1, 0
p_02, p_12, p_22, ..., p_(n-2)2, 0, 0
...
p_0n, 0, 0, ......................, 0],
Y is a 1 * (n + 1) vector for y values:
Y = [1, y, y^2, ..., y^n],
X is a (n + 1) * 1 vector for x values:
X = [1, x, x^2, ..., x^n]^T.
After doing some reading and online search, I finally got the idea how multisampling works in opengl pipeline.
The idea is, every primitive is sampled multiple times per pixel. When it comes to present the final image, all of the samples for the pixel are resolved to determine the final pixel’s color.
In the pipeline, multisampling works as follows:
1. The rasterizer generates separate depth and stencil values for samples per pixel.
2. When calculating the colors of the samples, the pipeline invokes the fragment program if any of the samples are located within the primitive. In the fragment program, the color is calculated using the sample located in the center of the pixel. Now we get a single color from the fragment program, this color is coped to all the samples within the primitive.
3. The colors of the samples are stored in a multisampled texture. Each sample may cover multiple primitives, but the final multsampled texture only store the nearest one. Thus, when updating an existed sample, depth test is excuted to determine whether to update.
4. Final stage: average the multisamped texture to generate a single color corresponding to its pixel.
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