VPOS

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:35:38 +0000

Starting with DirectX Pixel Shader Model 3.0 there exist an input type called VPOS. It’s the current pixels position on the screen and it’s automatically generated. This can be useful when sampling from a previously rendered texture when rendering an arbitrarily shaped mesh to the screen. To do this, we need uv-coords that represents where to sample on the texture. These coordinates can be gained by simply dividing VPOS with the screen dimensions.
When working with older hardware, that doesn’t support shader model 3.0, there is a need to manually create the VPOS in the vertex shader and pass it to the fragment shader as a TEXCOORD. This is the way to do so ( including the scaling to uv-range which manually has to be done for VPOS if you’re using it).

Vertex Shader:

float4x4 matWorldViewProjection;
float2 fInverseViewportDimensions;
struct VS_INPUT
{
   float4 Position : POSITION0;
};
struct VS_OUTPUT
{
   float4 Position : POSITION0;
   float4 calculatedVPos : TEXCOORD0;
};
float4 ConvertToVPos( float4 p )
{
   return float4( 0.5*( float2(p.x + p.w, p.w - p.y) + p.w*fInverseViewportDimensions.xy), p.zw);
}
 
VS_OUTPUT vs_main( VS_INPUT Input )
{
   VS_OUTPUT Output;
   Output.Position = mul( Input.Position, matWorldViewProjection );
   Output.calculatedVPos = ConvertToVPos(Output.Position);
   return( Output );
}

Pixel Shader:

float4 ps_main(VS_OUTPUT Input) : COLOR0
{
   Input.calculatedVPos /= Input.calculatedVPos.w;
   return float4(Input.calculatedVPos.xy,0,1); // test render it to the screen
}

The image below shows an elephant model rendered with the shader above. As can be seen, the color (red and green channels) correctly represents the uv-coords for a fullscreen quad. Since 0,0,0 = black, 1,0,0 = red, 0,1,0 = green, 1, 1,0 = yellow.

This is how the pixel shader would have looked like if VPOS were used instead (note: no special vertex shader needed in this case).

struct PS_INPUT
{
   float2 vPos : VPOS;
};

float4 ps_main(PS_INPUT Input) : COLOR0
{
   return float4(Input.vPos*fInverseViewportDimensions + fInverseViewportDimensions*0.5,0,1); // test render it to the screen
}

The original code, more info and proof can be found here:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=506573

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Shader Programming Guides

admin — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:16:30 +0000

Here are some links to a couple of quick guides and references that’s useful when writing shaders.

The OpenGL GLSL shader language Quick Reference Guide.
http://www.opengl.org/sdk/libs/OpenSceneGraph/glsl_quickref.pdf

The full specification of GLSL 1.20.8.
http://www.opengl.org/registry/doc/GLSLangSpec.Full.1.20.8.pdf

The full specification of GLSL 1.30.08
http://www.opengl.org/registry/doc/GLSLangSpec.Full.1.30.08.pdf

GPU Programming guide from Nvidia for both OpenGL and DirectX.
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/GPU_Programming_Guide/GPU_Programming_Guide.pdf

Guide to write shaders in DirectX9 in HLSL
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb944006(VS.85).aspx

Guide to write shaders in DirectX10 in HLSL
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb509703(VS.85).aspx

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Game Rendering » Shaders

VPOS

Shader Programming Guides