I would like to play around with testing a 3D map, of sorts. At it's simplest, one flat pane, with map lines etc. drawn onto it, flat (as if I was drawing onto an HTML canvas). But I want that pane to be movable in 3D space.
I know that I can make a flat pane in three.js very simply, but is it possible to implement some sort of 'custom texture' that would allow me to programmatically draw onto this pane?
It is called render-to-texture in webGL.
Three.js provides WebGLRenderTarget which can be used as image source for further textures. You render your scene to WebGLRenderTarget instead of main WebGL screen. Then you use this WebGLRenderTarget as image source for the texture.
A lot of 2D post-processing works like this. They render the world to 2D texture, then use fragment shaders to apply per-pixel postprocessing code, like blurring.
For examples, see e.g. http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_postprocessing.html
It renders the scene for 2D postprocessing, but the theory is the same.
Here is the WebGLRenderTarget setup code:
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/examples/js/postprocessing/EffectComposer.js#L14
Related
I've been looking for a solution to this problem for a project I'm working on. I'd like to know if there is a way to click on a plane geometry and draw onto it, paint style, and have the texture update as you draw on it.
After this, is there a way to save that texture while in the browser now that you've edited it?
You could use raycasting to determine the UV texture position where the mouse intersection takes place. Raycaster.intersectObject returns an array of objects, one of its properties is .uv. You can see it in action in this demo.
You can use a 2D <canvas> as the source of the texture. Once you have the UVs from the intersection, you could use that position to draw on the canvas as demonstrated in this other demo
I'm working with an orthographic view in three.js/WebGL renderer, and I want a magnifying glass that tracks with the user mouse. I'm looking for the best way of doing this that's efficient.
When working with html5 canvas raw commands, this was easy: I simply defined a circular clip region, zoomed my coordinates, and re-drew the whole scene. With 3d objects, it's less obvious how do to it.
The method I've found so far is to do the following:
Define a second camera that looks into the zoomed region. Set the orthographic clip coordinates to be small so that it doesn't need to do much work
Create a THREE.WebGLRenderTarget
Tell the renderer and all my line textures that the resolution is about to change
Render the scene into the RenderTarget
Add a CircleGeometry as a MeshObject at the spot at the mouse position (in world coordinate but above the rest of the scene, close to the camera). Call this the lens.
Give the lens the WebGLRenderTarget as a texture.
Go back to my default camera, reset all my resolution parameters, and redraw the scene with the 'lens' object added.
This works (see image below) but I'm worried about parts of it:
I have to render twice per frame
Lines don't draw well, because the resolution problems. I have to keep track of all materials that need to know screen resolution and update all of them twice per screen render.
Related problems:
I want to overlay some plot axes on top of this, and possibly gridlines. These would change as the view pans. I'm not sure if I should make these 3d objects, or do it in a 2d canvas context I lay overtop.
I want to overlay some plot lines, and have them show up sensibly in the zoomed view. "Sensible" here is hard to figure out: I don't want them too fat in the zoomed view, but I also don't want to scale them up as much as the image detail (which is being rendered as a texture onto Plane objects behind).
This is a long post, but I'm still new to three.js and looking for good ideas.
Can you please explain the difference between texture and sprite? When we zoom in a sprite, it appears blurry because it's basically an image. Is it the same for a texture?
I read this comment on the image below online:
The background layers are textures and not sprites.
Can someone explain?
Sprites and Textures are both images.
A Sprite is an image that can be used as a 2d object, which have coordinates (x, y) and which you can move, destroy or create during the game.
A Texture is also an image, but that will be used to change the appearence of an object. E.g. you can set a texture for the faces of a cube, a layer (like the background) or even a sprite. But as texture are not objects, you can't move them during the game.
Sprite is the image that is moving related to static images (for example background). Sprites are usually planes (rectangles) with texture on it. Sprites are used in 3D graphics for tricks such as Billboard or Impostor. In 2D games sprites are used instead of moving objects and also as backgrounds.
Texture is an raster image that is to be projected on polygonal object. It worth using textures each time when using polygons is expensive for given objects details (for example bullet dots)
I am visualizing a graph using Three.js and for each node of the graph I add a label using TextGeometry. It is a pretty small graph but when I add text my application gets really slow. What should I do about it?
TextGeometry is more suitable for cases when you are really interested in rendering the text in 3D. It will create complex geometry that will surely slow your app down specially when there is a lot of text or you use CanvasRenderer.
For labels, it is generally better to use 2D labels, which are way faster to render. There are many different approaches to this. These can go on top of the Three.js rendering canvas, on a separate canvas, or even normal HTML nodes positioned using CSS properties. Alternatively, you can dynamically create small canvases of your label texts, and use them as sprite textures always facing camera - this might be the easiest way as the labels would be part of the 3D scene as your other objects. For a separate layer approach, you need to use unprojectVector or such to figure out screen XY coordinates to match your 3D scene positions.
See these SO posts for example:
- Dynamically create 2D text in three.js
- Canvas and SpriteMaterial
- How do I add a tag/label to appear on top of several objects so that the tag always faces the camera when the user clicks the object?
I am trying to make a 3d car race in iphone using OPENGL ES 1.x.
I do not know how to draw the background sky in my scene. I tried using only planes for background but where should i placed that plane? I mean if i placed that plane outside the whole track then the frustum is not so big to show that planes in the scene.
Any suggestions will be of great help.
You can make a small skysphere or box, as suggested by Davido and turbovonce's link, which is centered around the viwer and fits into the frustum. You draw this first, without writing into the depth buffer. Then you draw the other stuff and as the skybox has not written to depth buffer it is just overwritten, except the parts where no scene objects are rendered, which are exactly the parts of the image where the sky should be visible.
You want a sky dome. Take a look at this website, it contains tons of references that should help you.
http://www.vterrain.org/Atmosphere/
Create a sphere in a 3d modeling app such as Maya or Blender and map a sky texture to the sphere. Export the model then load the model and its texture into the app, place in the scene. You should now have a background sky rendering in your game.