Game Rendering » Vertex Shader

Great free graphics programming books!

Books | Thursday 10 December 2009 2:25 pm

Here is a list of good books that all graphics programmer’s should read. They are a little dated now, but FREE!

Feel free to mention in the comments if you know other free books online.

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Gaussian Blur Filter Shader

Image Enhancements | Saturday 11 October 2008 9:01 pm

There are different ways to perform blur and this is one of the most common way to do it in a shader. It’s a two step method with first a horizontal blur and then a vertical blur. By splitting the work in two directions (two passes) you can save a lot of computation.

The method can be divided in the following parts:

Render the scene you want to blur to a texture (could be downsampled)
Render a screen aligned quad with the horizontal blur shader to a texture
Render a screen aligned quad with the vertical blur shader to the screen or texture depending on what you want to use it for

The following image shows how the blur works when splitted up in two directions.

Here’s the horizontal blur shader.

Vertex Shader (GLSL) . This shader screen align a quad with width 1. Any method to render a screen aligned quad will work. So you’re free to use other shaders.

varying vec2 vTexCoord;
 
// remember that you should draw a screen aligned quad
void main(void)
{
   gl_Position = ftransform();;
  
   // Clean up inaccuracies
   vec2 Pos;
   Pos = sign(gl_Vertex.xy);
 
   gl_Position = vec4(Pos, 0.0, 1.0);
   // Image-space
   vTexCoord = Pos * 0.5 + 0.5;
}

Fragment Shader (GLSL)

uniform sampler2D RTScene; // the texture with the scene you want to blur
varying vec2 vTexCoord;
 
const float blurSize = 1.0/512.0; // I've chosen this size because this will result in that every step will be one pixel wide if the RTScene texture is of size 512x512
 
void main(void)
{
   vec4 sum = vec4(0.0);
 
   // blur in y (vertical)
   // take nine samples, with the distance blurSize between them
   sum += texture2D(RTScene, vec2(vTexCoord.x - 4.0*blurSize, vTexCoord.y)) * 0.05;
   sum += texture2D(RTScene, vec2(vTexCoord.x - 3.0*blurSize, vTexCoord.y)) * 0.09;
   sum += texture2D(RTScene, vec2(vTexCoord.x - 2.0*blurSize, vTexCoord.y)) * 0.12;
   sum += texture2D(RTScene, vec2(vTexCoord.x - blurSize, vTexCoord.y)) * 0.15;
   sum += texture2D(RTScene, vec2(vTexCoord.x, vTexCoord.y)) * 0.16;
   sum += texture2D(RTScene, vec2(vTexCoord.x + blurSize, vTexCoord.y)) * 0.15;
   sum += texture2D(RTScene, vec2(vTexCoord.x + 2.0*blurSize, vTexCoord.y)) * 0.12;
   sum += texture2D(RTScene, vec2(vTexCoord.x + 3.0*blurSize, vTexCoord.y)) * 0.09;
   sum += texture2D(RTScene, vec2(vTexCoord.x + 4.0*blurSize, vTexCoord.y)) * 0.05;
 
   gl_FragColor = sum;
}

And here’s the vertical blur shader.

Vertex Shader (GLSL) (the same as for the blur in horizontal direction)

varying vec2 vTexCoord;
 
// remember that you should draw a screen aligned quad
void main(void)
{
   gl_Position = ftransform();;
  
   // Clean up inaccuracies
   vec2 Pos;
   Pos = sign(gl_Vertex.xy);
 
   gl_Position = vec4(Pos, 0.0, 1.0);
   // Image-space
   vTexCoord = Pos * 0.5 + 0.5;
}

Fragment Shader (GLSL)

uniform sampler2D RTBlurH; // this should hold the texture rendered by the horizontal blur pass
varying vec2 vTexCoord;
 
const float blurSize = 1.0/512.0;
 
void main(void)
{
   vec4 sum = vec4(0.0);
 
   // blur in y (vertical)
   // take nine samples, with the distance blurSize between them
   sum += texture2D(RTBlurH, vec2(vTexCoord.x, vTexCoord.y - 4.0*blurSize)) * 0.05;
   sum += texture2D(RTBlurH, vec2(vTexCoord.x, vTexCoord.y - 3.0*blurSize)) * 0.09;
   sum += texture2D(RTBlurH, vec2(vTexCoord.x, vTexCoord.y - 2.0*blurSize)) * 0.12;
   sum += texture2D(RTBlurH, vec2(vTexCoord.x, vTexCoord.y - blurSize)) * 0.15;
   sum += texture2D(RTBlurH, vec2(vTexCoord.x, vTexCoord.y)) * 0.16;
   sum += texture2D(RTBlurH, vec2(vTexCoord.x, vTexCoord.y + blurSize)) * 0.15;
   sum += texture2D(RTBlurH, vec2(vTexCoord.x, vTexCoord.y + 2.0*blurSize)) * 0.12;
   sum += texture2D(RTBlurH, vec2(vTexCoord.x, vTexCoord.y + 3.0*blurSize)) * 0.09;
   sum += texture2D(RTBlurH, vec2(vTexCoord.x, vTexCoord.y + 4.0*blurSize)) * 0.05;
 
   gl_FragColor = sum;
}

And this is a scene without blur.

And this is the same scene but with gaussian blur.

You can tweak the blur radius to change the size of the blur and change the number of samples in each direction.

Cost for separable blur shader : 9+9 = 18 (number of texture samples)
Cost for shader if blured in one pass: 9*9 = 81 (number of texture samples)
So splitting up in two directions saves a lot.

The gaussian weights are calculated accordingly to the gaussian function with standard deviation of 2.7. These calculations were done in the excel document found [2].

Here’s a description of blur shaders and other image processing shaders in DirectX:
[1] http://ati.amd.com/developer/shaderx/ShaderX2_AdvancedImageProcessing.pdf

More info about calculating weights for separable gaussian blur:
[2] http://theinstructionlimit.com/?p=40

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Animated Grass with Vertex Displacement

Vegetation | Wednesday 8 October 2008 10:25 pm

This is a very easy way to animate the grass of a scene in a realistic way. You render the grass the usual way with intersecting quads distributed randomly on the terrain you want the grass on. Then in the vertex shader, the top two vertices are displaced with the combination of four sinus waves. This gives a waving grass.

The result might look like this (this really depends on the quality of the textures used for grass).

In the original paper, you can find a source code for the shaders and full description of the technique.
http://ati.amd.com/developer/shaderx/shaderx_animatedgrass.pdf

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Bilinear Interpolation

Filtering | Sunday 5 October 2008 5:18 pm

When sampling a texel from a texture that has been re-sized (which is nearly always the case in 3D rendering) you need to use some kind of filter to select what result you should get. Bilinear interpolation uses the four nearest neighbors to interpolate an average texel value.

This is a built in filter in OpenGL and to activate it you set the following lines when setting up a texture:

// set the minification filter
glTexParameterf( GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST );
// set the magnification filter
glTexParameterf( GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR );

If you for some reason wants to do bilinear interpolation manually in a shader then the function to do so looks like the following in GLSL. Note that in vertex shaders you have to do manual bilinear interpolation between texture samples.

const float textureSize = 512.0; //size of the texture
const float texelSize = 1.0 / textureSize; //size of one texel 
 
vec4 texture2DBilinear( sampler2D textureSampler, vec2 uv )
{
    // in vertex shaders you should use texture2DLod instead of texture2D
    vec4 tl = texture2D(textureSampler, uv);
    vec4 tr = texture2D(textureSampler, uv + vec2(texelSize, 0));
    vec4 bl = texture2D(textureSampler, uv + vec2(0, texelSize));
    vec4 br = texture2D(textureSampler, uv + vec2(texelSize , texelSize));
    vec2 f = fract( uv.xy * textureSize ); // get the decimal part
    vec4 tA = mix( tl, tr, f.x ); // will interpolate the red dot in the image
    vec4 tB = mix( bl, br, f.x ); // will interpolate the blue dot in the image
    return mix( tA, tB, f.y ); // will interpolate the green dot in the image
}

Here’s a magnification of a texture using using three different types of filters. The texture is mapped on a sphere and the viewport has been zoomed in on a small part of it.

Nearest Neigbour (OpenGL fixed function implementation)