Let's say we have the following code:
void setup() {
background(0);
size(200, 200);
fill(255);
rect(75, 75, 50, 50);
}
void draw() {
fill(0, 2);
rect(0, 0, width, height);
}
Even after waiting 'forever,' the white 50x50 rectangle is still visible, albeit faded. Why doesn't the fill(0, 2) eventually cover this up?
I suppose this question is twofold:
Why doesn't it eventually fade to black, as in why does drawing another dark rectangle on top of the white one not erase it eventually (I'm thinking along the lines of putting tinted windows over each other; eventually even the brightest light won't shine through), and
Why doesn't it eventually fade to black, as in why is this the behavior intended by the Processing community?
Here's a post explaining what's going on: http://processing.org/discourse/beta/num_1138703939.html
Basically, the problem is that Processing stores colors as ints, but takes float arguments. When combining colors, Processing rounds the floats to ints. In your case, your color is getting stuck at a value of 63, 63, 63 because at that point the blending is too slight to make a difference that is detectable after rounding.
The solution is to do the fading from the source, not by overlaying an alpha color over top.
I had the same issue with fill(0, 0, 0, 5);.
Interestingly, changing the alpha value to 20 helped (and I'm sure many other values work too).
void draw() {
fill(0, 0, 0, 20); // Note the value 20 for the alpha channel.
rect(0, 0, width, height);
}
The default background color is darker than the color you assigned to the first rectangle, thus it gets black sooner.
Why doesn't it eventually fade to black, as in why does drawing another dark rectangle on top of the white one not erase it eventually
(I'm thinking along the lines of putting tinted windows over each
other; eventually even the brightest light won't shine through), and
Why doesn't it eventually fade to black, as in why is this the behavior intended by the Processing community?
Also, in your original code (not the above sample) you're probably drawing the white rectangle continuously, so it will never fade.
Related
how would a go about drawing the inner blue slice of this circle, to simulate varying stroke weight.
I have tried a approach where i draw the stroke by drawing small circles on each angle of the circle and increasing the radius on certain parts of the circle. But this doesnt give the right result because the circle gets "pixelated" in the edge, and it skews the circle outwards.
There is no easy way to accomplish this. Part of the difficulty is that Canvas, the underlying technology that p5.js uses to draw graphics, doesn't support variable stroke weights either. In Scalable Vector Graphics, which has similar limitations, the best way to accomplish this would be to describe the shape as the outer perimeter, and the perimeter of the inner void, and then fill the shape without any stroke. I think Canvas would support this approach, but I don't think it can be done easily with p5.js because there's now way to jump to a new position when drawing bezier curves with beginShape()/bezierVertex(). However, one way you could do this in p5.js would be to fill the outer shape and then "remove" the inner void. If you want to draw this on top of other existing graphics then the best way is to draw this shape to a separate p5.Graphics object which you then draw to your main canvas with image():
let sprite;
function setup() {
createCanvas(windowWidth, windowHeight);
sprite = createGraphics(100, 100);
sprite.noStroke();
sprite.fill('black');
sprite.angleMode(DEGREES);
sprite.circle(50, 50, 100);
// switch to removing elements from the graphics
sprite.erase();
// Translate and rotate to match the shape you showed in your question
sprite.translate(50, 50);
sprite.rotate(-45);
// Remove a perfect semi circle from one half, producing regular 5px stroke circle
sprite.arc(0, 0, 90, 90, -90, 90);
// Remove a half-ellipse from the other side of the circle, but this time the
// height matches the previous arc, but the width is narrower.
// Note: the angles for this arc overlap the previous removal by a few degrees
// to prevent there from being a visible seam in between the two removed shapes.
sprite.arc(0, 0, 70, 90, 85, 275, OPEN);
}
function draw() {
background('lightgray');
image(sprite, mouseX - 50, mouseY - 50);
}
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/p5.js/1.4.0/p5.js"></script>
Repeatedly drawing a semi-opaque black rectangle over the entire canvas before each animation frame is an easy way to get an afterimage effect for moving shapes and it gives me exactly what I need - up to a point. With too slow a fade it doesn't fade all the way to black. Here's an example:
var canv = document.createElement('canvas');
document.body.appendChild(canv);
var ctx = canv.getContext('2d');
ctx.fillStyle = 'rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)';
ctx.fillRect(0, 0, 100, 100);
ctx.fillStyle = 'rgba(255, 255, 255, 1)';
ctx.fillRect(20, 20, 60, 60);
window.requestAnimationFrame(doFade);
function doFade() {
// Never fades away completely
ctx.fillStyle = 'rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.02)';
ctx.fillRect(20, 20, 60, 60);
window.requestAnimationFrame(doFade);
}
jsfiddle
This looks to me like a numeric precision problem - you can't expect the canvas to keep floating point pixel values around - but I'm not sure how to get around this.
I tried reading the image into a pattern, blanking the canvas, and then filling with the pattern at lower opacity in the hope that I could make rounding error work in my favor, but it seems to have the same result.
Short of reading out the image data and setting to black any pixels below a certain threshold, which would be prohibitively slow, I'm running out of ideas and could use some suggestions.
Thanks!
I thought I'd share my solution for the benefit of anyone else who might run into this problem. I was hoping to avoid doing any pixel-level manipulation, but beyond a certain threshold it's just not possible with the built-in canvas operations because the underlying bitmap is only 8 bits per channel and small fades will work out to less than one least significant bit and won't have any effect on the image data.
My solution was to create an array representing the age of each pixel. After each frame is drawn, I scan the imageData array, looking only at the alpha channel. If the alpha is 255 I know the pixel has just been written, so I set the age to 0 and set the alpha to 254. For any other non-zero alpha values, I increment the pixel age and then set the new alpha based on the pixel age.
The mapping of pixel age to alpha value is done with a lookup table that's populated when the fade rate is set. This lets me use whatever decay curve I want without extra math during the rendering loop.
The CPU utilization is a bit higher, but it's not too much of a performance hit and it can do smooth fades over several seconds and always fades entirely to black eventually.
What value fed to strokeWidth() will give a stroke width of one pixel regardless of the current scale() setting?
I think strokeWeight(0) should work. Here is an example:
void setup() {
size(100,100);
noFill();
scale(10);
// 1st square, stroke will be 10 pixels
translate(3,3);
strokeWeight(1);
beginShape();
vertex(-1.0, -1.0);
vertex(-1.0, 1.0);
vertex( 1.0, 1.0);
vertex( 1.0, -1.0);
endShape(CLOSE);
// 2nd square, stroke will be 1 pixel
translate(3,3);
strokeWeight(0);
beginShape();
vertex(-1.0, -1.0);
vertex(-1.0, 1.0);
vertex( 1.0, 1.0);
vertex( 1.0, -1.0);
endShape(CLOSE);
}
Kevin did offer a couple of good approaches.
Your question doesn't make it clear what level of comfort you have with the language. My assumption (and I could be wrong) is that the layers approach isn't clear as you might have not used PGraphics before.
However, this option Kevin provided is simple and straight forward:
multiplying the coordinates manually
Notice most drawing functions take not only the coordinates, but also dimensions ?
Don't use scale(), but keep track of a multiplier floating point variable that you use for the shape dimensions. Manually scale the dimensions of each shape:
void draw(){
//map mouseX to a scale between 10% and 300%
float scale = map(constrain(mouseX,0,width),0,width,0.1,3.0);
background(255);
//scale the shape dimensions, without using scale()
ellipse(50,50, 30 * scale, 30 * scale);
}
You can run this as a demo bellow:
function setup(){
createCanvas(100,100);
}
function draw(){
//map mouseX to a scale between 10% and 300%
var scale = map(constrain(mouseX,0,width),0,width,0.1,3.0);
background(200);
//scale the shape dimensions, without using scale()
ellipse(50,50, 30 * scale, 30 * scale);
}
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/p5.js/0.5.7/p5.min.js"></script>
Another answer is in the question itself: what value would you feed to strokeWidth() ? If scale() is making the stroke bigger, but you want to keep it's appearance the same, that means you need to use a smaller stroke weight as scale increases: the thickness is inversely proportional to the scale:
void draw(){
//map mouseX to a scale between 10% and 300%
float scale = map(constrain(mouseX,0,width),0,width,0.1,3.0);
background(255);
translate(50,50);
scale(scale);
strokeWeight(1/scale);
//scaled shape, same appearing stroke, just smaller in value as scale increases
ellipse(0,0, 30, 30);
}
You can run this bellow:
function setup(){
createCanvas(100,100);
}
function draw(){
//map mouseX to a scale between 10% and 300%
var scaleValue = map(constrain(mouseX,0,width),0,width,0.1,3.0);
background(240);
translate(50,50);
scale(scaleValue);
strokeWeight(1/scaleValue);
//scale the shape dimensions, without using scale()
ellipse(0,0, 30, 30);
}
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/p5.js/0.5.7/p5.min.js"></script>
Kevin was patient, not only to answer your question, but also your comments, being generous with his time. You need to be patient to carefully read and understand the answers provided. Try it on your own then come back with specific questions on clarifications if that's the case. It's the best way to learn.
Simply asking "how do I do this ?" without showing what you're tried and what your thinking behind the problem is, expecting a snippet to copy/paste will not get your very far and this is not what stackoverflow is about.
You'll have way more to gain by learning, using the available documentation and especially thinking about the problem on your own first. You might not crack the problem at the first go (I know I certainly don't), but reasoning about it and viewing it from different angles will get your gears going.
Always be patient, it will serve you well on the long run, regardless of the situation.
Update Perhaps you mean by
What value fed to strokeWidth() will give a stroke width of one pixel regardless of the current scale() setting?
is how can you draw without anti-aliasing ?
If so, you can disable smoothing via a line: calling noSmooth(); once in setup(). Try it with the example code above.
None.
The whole point of scale() is that it, well, scales everything.
You might want to draw things in layers: draw one scaled layer, and one unscaled layer that contains the single-pixel-width lines. Then combine those layers.
That won't work if you need your layers to be mixed, such as an unscaled line on top of a scaled shape, on top of another scaled line. In that case you'll just have to unscale before drawing your lines, then scale again to draw your shapes.
I have this code to draw a rectangle on a 256z256 picturebox, however, I don't see the whole rectangle, I only see half of it.. what it might be?
e.Graphics.DrawRectangle(mypen,0,0,256,256);
Maybe it draws it from the center? Try
Rectangle m_rectangle = new Rectangle(0, 0, 512, 512);
e.Graphics.DrawRectangle(mypen,m_rectangle);
Just a stab in the dark.
Please check this neat piece of code I found:
glEnable(GL_LINE_SMOOTH);
glColor4ub(0, 0, 0, 150);
mmDrawCircle( ccp(100, 100), 20, 0, 50, NO);
glLineWidth(40);
ccDrawLine(ccp(100, 100), ccp(100 + 100, 100));
mmDrawCircle( ccp(100+100, 100), 20, 0, 50, NO);
where mmDrawCircle and ccDrawLine just draws these shapes [FILLED] somehow... (ccp means a point with the given x, y coordinates respectively).
My problem .... Yes, you guessed it, The line overlaps with the circle, and both are translucent (semi transparent). So, the final shape is there, but the overlapping part becomes darker and the overall shape looks ugly.. i.e, I would be fine if I was drawing with 255 alpha.
Is there a way to tell OpenGL to render one of the shapes in the overlapping parts??
(The shape is obviously a rectangle with rounded edges .. half-circles..)
You could turn on GL_DEPTH_TEST and render the line first and a little closer to the camera. When you then render the circle below, the fragments of the line won't be touched.
(You can also use the stencil buffer for an effect like this).
Note that this might still look ugly. If you want to use anti-aliasing you should think quite hard on which blending modes you apply and in what order you render the primitives.