This is my first direct3d program. I'm not even aware of keywords to search for. I have set up a simple 3D world and a camera. I need to get hold of the actual pixel coordinates rendered for a given camera position. I also need to know which 3D points, the points in screen-space map to.
As of now, my code calls:
device.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, vertexBuffer.VertexCount, 0, indexBuffer.IndexCount / 3);
and this call is a blackbox to me. My problem would be solved, if this call would just return a list of 2D points in screen space that correspond to the vertices that I'm passing to it.
If there is no way of doing what I'm looking for, what is the closest thing to this that I can get?
For each vertex you are rendering, you can apply it with the world, view and projection matrix to get the protective points on the screen. By the way, why do you need the screen points?
Related
I am trying my hand at writing a 3d graphics engine, but I am having some trouble with drawing the shapes in the correct order.
When I translate the points of triangles into window space, i.e. the 2-dimensional space that directly correlates to position on the screen, in addition to an x and y position of each point, I also assign them a depth variable that stores how far away from the viewer that point was in 3d space.
At the moment, the only shapes I am rendering are triangles. My current render order algorithm sorts the triangles by the average depth of their 3 points. I knew when I started it that it would not be perfect, but I wanted a placeholder for testing.
For testing purposes, I constructed a square box with an open top, each side being a different color and made from 2 triangles, as shown below:
As you can see from the image above, the algorithm I am using works most of the time. However, at certain angles and positions, the triangles will be rendered in the wrong order, as show below:
As you can see, one of the cyan triangles on the bottom of the box is being drawn before one of the yellow triangles on the side. Clearly, sorting the triangles by the average depth of their points is not satisfactory.
Is there a better method of ordering shapes so that they are rendered in the correct order?
The standard method to draw 3D in correct depth order is to use a Z-buffer.
Basically, the idea is that for each pixel you set in the color buffer, you also set it's interpolated depth in the z (depth..) buffer. Whenever you're about to paint the next pixel, you first check that z-buffer to validate the new pixel if in front of the already painted pixel.
On top of that you can add various sorts of optimizations, such as sorting triangles in order to minimize the number of times you actually paint the color buffer.
On the other hand, it's sometimes required to do the exact opposite in order to properly handle transparency or other "advanced" effects.
Back story: I'm creating a Three.js based 3D graphing library. Similar to sigma.js, but 3D. It's called graphosaurus and the source can be found here. I'm using Three.js and using a single particle representing a single node in the graph.
This was the first task I had to deal with: given an arbitrary set of points (that each contain X,Y,Z coordinates), determine the optimal camera position (X,Y,Z) that can view all the points in the graph.
My initial solution (which we'll call Solution 1) involved calculating the bounding sphere of all the points and then scale the sphere to be a sphere of radius 5 around the point 0,0,0. Since the points will be guaranteed to always fall in that area, I can set a static position for the camera (assuming the FOV is static) and the data will always be visible. This works well, but it either requires changing the point coordinates the user specified, or duplicating all the points, neither of which are great.
My new solution (which we'll call Solution 2) involves not touching the coordinates of the inputted data, but instead just positioning the camera to match the data. I encountered a problem with this solution. For some reason, when dealing with really large data, the particles seem to flicker when positioned in front/behind of other particles.
Here are examples of both solutions. Make sure to move the graph around to see the effects:
Solution 1
Solution 2
You can see the diff for the code here
Let me know if you have any insight on how to get rid of the flickering. Thanks!
It turns out that my near value for the camera was too low and the far value was too high, resulting in "z-fighting". By narrowing these values on my dataset, the problem went away. Since my dataset is user dependent, I need to determine an algorithm to generate these values dynamically.
I noticed that in the sol#2 the flickering only occurs when the camera is moving. One possible reason can be that, when the camera position is changing rapidly, different transforms get applied to different particles. So if a camera moves from X to X + DELTAX during a time step, one set of particles get the camera transform for X while the others get the transform for X + DELTAX.
If you separate your rendering from the user interaction, that should fix the issue, assuming this is the issue. That means that you should apply the same transform to all the particles and the edges connecting them, by locking (not updating ) the transform matrix until the rendering loop is done.
In my Android mapping activity, I have a parallelogram shaped area that I want to tell if points (ie:LatLng) are inside. I've tried using the:
bounds = new LatLngBounds.Builder()
.include(latlngNW)
.include(latlngNE)
.include(latlngSW)
.include(latlngSE)
.build();
and later
if (bounds.contains(currentLatLng) {
.....
}
but it is not that accurate. Do I need to create equations for lines connecting the four corners?
Thanks in advance.
The LatLngBounds appears to create a box from the points included. Given the shape that I'm trying to monitor is a parallelogram, you do need to create equations for each of the edges of the shape and use if statements to determine which side of the line a point lies.
Not an easy solution!
If you wish to build a parallelogram-shaped bounding "box" from a collection of points, and you know the desired angles of the parallelogram's sides, your best bet is to probably define a 2d linear shear transform which will one of those angles to horizontal, and the other to vertical. One may then feed the transformed points into normal "bounding box" routines, and feed the corners of the resulting box through the inverse of the above transform to get a bounding parallelogram.
Note that this approach is generally only suitable for parallelograms, not trapezoids. There are a few special cases where it could be used to find bounding trapezoids [e.g. if the top and bottom were horizontal, and the sides were supposed to converge at a known point (x0-y0), one could map x' = (x-x0)/(y-y0)] but for many kinds of trapezoids, the trapezoid formed by inverse mapping the corners of a horizontal/vertical bounding rectangle may not properly bound the points that are supposed to be within it.
A bit of background
I am writing a simple ray tracer in C++. I have most of the core complete but don't understand how to retrieve the world coordinate of a pixel on the image plane. I need this location so that I can cast the ray into the world.
Currently I have a Camera with a position(aka my perspective reference point), a direction (vector) which is not normalized. The directions length signifies the center of the image plane and which way the camera is facing.
There are other values associated with the camera but they should not be relevant.
My image coordinates will range from -1 to 1 and the perspective(focal length), will change based on the distance of the direction associated with the camera.
What I need help with
I need to go from pixel coordinates (say [0, 256] in an image 256 pixels on each side) to my world coordinates.
I will also want to program this so that no matter where the camera is placed and where it is directed, that I can find the pixel in the world coordinates. (Currently the camera will almost always be centered at the origin and will look down the negative z axis. I would like to program this with the future changes in mind.) It is also important to know if this code should be pushed down into my threaded code as well. Otherwise it will be calculated by the main thread and then the ray will be used in the threaded code.
(source: in.tum.de)
I did not make this image and it is only there to give an idea of what I need.
Please leave comments if you need any additional info. Otherwise I would like a simple theory/code example of what to do.
Basically you have to do the inverse process of V * MVP which transforms the point to unit cube dimensions. Look at the following urls for programming help
http://nehe.gamedev.net/article/using_gluunproject/16013/ https://sites.google.com/site/vamsikrishnav/gluunproject
I have given an assignment of to project a object in 3D space into a 2D plane using simple graphics in C. The question is that a cube is placed in fixed 3D space and there is camera which is placed in a position whose co-ordinates are x,y,z and the camera is looking at the origin i.e. 0,0,0. Now we have to project the cube vertex into the camera plane.
I am proceeding with the following steps
Step 1: I find the equation of the plane aX+bY+cZ+d=0 which is perpendicular to the line drawn from the camera position to the origin.
Step 2: I find the projection of each vertex of the cube to the plane which is obtained in the above step.
Now I want to map those vertex position which i got by projection in step 2 in the plane aX+bY+cZ+d=0 into my screen plane.
thanks,
I don't think that by letting the z co-ordinate equals zero will lead me to the actual mapping. So any help to figure out this.
You can do that in two simple steps:
Translate the cube's coordinates to the camera's system (using
rotation), such that the camera's own coordinates in that system are x=y=z=0 and the cube's translated z's are > 0.
Project the translated cube's coordinates onto a 2d plain by dividing its x's and y's by their respective z's (you may need to apply a constant scaling factor here for the coordinates to be reasonable for the screen, e.g. not too small and within +/-half the screen's height in pixels). This will create the perspective effect. You can now draw pixels using these divided x's and y's on the screen assuming x=y=0 is the center of it.
This is pretty much how it is done in 3d games. If you use cube vertex coordinates, then you get projections of its sides onto the screen. You may then solid-fill the resultant 2d shapes or texture-map them. But for that you'll have to first figure out which sides are not obscured by others (unless, of course, you use a technique called z-buffering). You don't need that for a simple wire-frame demo, though, just draw straight lines between the projected vertices.