I use Core Graphics to draw in an UIView, and cache the contents in a CGLayer.
One of its functions needs to duplicate a sub-area of the CGLayer and move it to a new location within the same layer. As a traditional trick, I used to do this by drawing the layer into its own context.
However, the behavior of this trick is "undefined" according to the documentation, and it stops working in iOS 12.
Is there an alternative way to do this efficiently? (I have tried drawing the sub-area into an CGImage then drawing the result image back to the layer. But this method seems sort of slow and not so memory efficient.:()
Related
I am working with some stuff in Core Graphic's and I am looking for some additional clarification regarding a couple of topics.
drawRect:
I have an understanding of this and know it is where all of the drawing aspect's of a UIView goes, but am just unclear as to what is happening behind the scene's. What happen's when I create a UIView and fill out drawRect then set another object's UIView to be that custom view? When is drawRect being called?
CGGraphicsContext:
I know what the purpose of this is and understand the concept, but I can't see exactly how it is working.
For example:
CGContextSaveGState(context);
CGContextAddRect(context, rect);
CGContextClip(context);
CGContextDrawLinearGradient(context, gradient, startPoint, endPoint, 0);
CGContextRestoreGState(context);
The code above is in my app and work's correctly. The thing that confuses me is how it is working. The idea of saving/restoring a context makes sense, but it appears like I am literally saving a context, using that exact same context to make change's, then restoring the same context once again. It just seem's like I am saving a context and then writing on top of that context, only to restore it. How is it getting saved to a point where when you restore it, it is a different instance of the context than what was just used to make changes? You use the same reference of the variable context in every situation.
Lastly I would appreciate any resource's for practice project's or example's on using Core Graphics. I am looking to improve my skill in the matter since I obviously don't have much at the current time.
What happen's when I create a UIView and fill out drawRect then set another object's UIView to be that custom view? When is drawRect being called?
Adding a view to a 'live' view graph marks the view's frame as in need of display. The main run loop then creates and coalesces invalid rects and soon returns to invoke drawing. It does not draw immediately upon invalidation. This is a good thing because resizing, for example, would result in significant overdrawing -- redundant work which would kill many apps' drawing performance. When drawing, a context is created to render to -- which ultimately outputs to its destination.
Graphics Contexts are abstractions which are free to work optimally for their destination -- a destination could be a device/screen, bitmap, PDF, etc.. However, a context handle (CGContextRef) itself refers to a destination and holds a set of parameters regarding its state (these parameters are all documented here). These parameter sets operate like stacks: Push = CGContextSaveGState, Pop = CGContextRestoreGState. Although the context pointer isn't changing, the stack of parameter sets is changing.
As far as resources, see Programming with Quartz. It's 8 years old now, and was originally written for OS X -- but that ultimately doesn't matter a whole lot because the fundamentals of the drawing system and APIs really haven't evolved significantly since then -- And that is what you intend to focus on. The APIs have been extended, so it would be good to review which APIs were introduced since 10.4 and see what problems they solve, but it's secretly a good thing for you because it helps maintain focus on the fundamental operation of the drawing system. Note that some functionalities were excluded from iOS (e.g. often due to floating point performance and memory constraints, I figure), so every example may not be usable on iOS, but I know of no better guide.
Tip: Your drawing code can be easily reused on OS X and iOS if you use Quartz rather than AppKit/UIKit. Plus, the Quartz APIs have a lower update frequency (i.e. the APIs tend to be longer lived).
-drawRect: gets called at some point after you (e.g. your view controller) have called the view's method -setNeedsDisplay or -setNeedsDisplayInRect:.
Saving the graphics state pushes the current graphics state onto a stack. The graphics state contains fill and stroke setting, the current transformation matrix etc. See Apple's documentation for details.
The Quartz 2D Programming Guide doesn't contain many examples but is otherwise quite thorough.
With quartz/ core graphics the context is literally a set of current parameters to use to draw the next drawing command on top of the previous drawing.
Saving the state let's you save all those parameters for later drawing commands that will reuse them.
Then you can set up a different set of parameters for some drawing commands.
Restoring the state gets you back to where you were.
I recommend the book
Programming with Quartz
2D and PDF Graphics in Mac OS X
Though a bit dated in some ways, it will really teach you how quartz / core graphics really flows.
Ok this is a very very deep topic to talk about. I'll explain a few things to my understanding & try to keep it simple. If I'm mistaken I hope someone can correct me out.
first of all there is concept of onscreen drawing and offscreen drawing. On screen drawing is taken place in GPU where offscreen drawing is taken place in CPU to draw things and then its given to GPU to display on the screen. Thats where drawRect() comes in to place (drawrect is only 1 way of doing the offscreen drawings btw). This is why in the drawRect template method (you will see when you make a subclass of UIView) there is a comment by Apple telling
"Only override drawRect: if you perform custom drawing. An empty implementation adversely affects performance during animation"
The reason is whenever there is drawRect method, the iOS would have to ask the CPU to takecare of the drawing which takes place in drawRect and hand it over to the GPU. (Dont get the idea that this is a bad thing :) ). So this is what happens in drawRect in an abstract level.
Now to the question of why save & restore same context over and over. Have you tried to read the description of the method in apple doc about save/restore context ? If you have, you'd notice that it shows all the graphical states which would be affected by this. Ok how does this help ?
Consider something like this. Lets say you're drawing on a rectangle where you have to limit this next part of the drawing on the right half of it and use shadows and antialiasing, etc. You can save your context before drawing the right side and set whatever properties you want and once you finish that, you can simply restore the context and you can continue with all the settings you had before without explicitly setting them again. It's a good practice as well when you do complex drawings as otherwise it would have weird outcomes you might not expect. something like this below
- drawRect()
{
CGContextSaveGState(context);
drawLeftPart(); // - 1
drawRightPart(); // - 2
someOtherDrawing(); // - 3
CGContextRestoreGState(context);
}
- drawLeftPart()
{
CGContextSaveGState(context);
// do your drawing
CGContextRestoreGState(context);
}
- drawRightPart()
{
CGContextSaveGState(context);
// do your drawing
CGContextRestoreGState(context);
}
- someOtherDrawing()
{
CGContextSaveGState(context);
// do your drawing
CGContextRestoreGState(context);
}
Now what ever properties you set in part 1 wont affect drawing of part 2 & 3 so forth.
Hope this helps,
I am drawing many audio meters on a view and finding that drawRect can not keep up with the speed of the audio change. In practice only a very small part of the image changes at a time so I really only want to draw the incremental changes.
I have created a CGLayer and when the data changes I use CGContextBeginPath, CGContextMoveToPoint, CGContextAddLineToPoint and CGContextStrokePath to draw in the CGLayer.
In drawRect in the view I use CGContextDrawLayerAtPoint to display the layer.
When the data changes I draw just the difference by drawing a line over the top in the CGLayer. I had assumed it was like photoshop and the new data just draws over the old but I now believe that all the lines I have ever drawn remain present in the layer. Is that correct?
If so is there a way to remove lines from a CGLayer?
What exactly do you mean by 'audio meter' show some snapshots of your intended designs. Shows us some code...
These are my suggestions-
1) Yes the new data just draws on top of CGLayer unless you release it CGLayerRelease(layer)
2) CGContextStrokePath is an expensive operation. You may want to create a generic line stroke and store them in UIImage. Then reuse the UIImage everytime your datachanges.
3) Simplest solution: use UIProgressView if you just want to show audio levels.
I now believe that all the lines I have ever drawn remain present in the layer. Is that correct?
Yes.
If so is there a way to remove lines from a CGLayer?
No. There is not. You would create a new layer. Generally, you create a layer for what is drawn repeatedly.
Your drawing may be able to be simplified by drawing rects rather than paths.
For some audio meters, dividing the meter into multiple pieces may help (you could use a CGLayer here). Similarly, you may be able to just draw rectangles selectively and/or clip drawing, images, and/or layers.
I'm working on a graphing application which I wrote using Core Graphics. I have a buffer which accumulates data, and I render it on the screen. It's super slow and I want to avoid going to openGL if possible. According to the profiler, drawing my graph data is what's killing me (which consists of a number of points which are converted to a path, followed by the calls AddPath, DrawPath)..
This is what I want to do, my question is how to best implement it using layers / views / etc..
I have a grid and some text. I want this to be rendered in a CALayer (or some other layer/view?) and only update when required (the graph is rescaled).
Only a portion of the data needs to be refreshed. I want to take the previous screen buffer, erase a rectangle's worth of data (or cover it with a white box) and then draw only the portion of the graphs that have changed.
I then want to merge the background layer with the foreground graphs to generate the composite image. This requires the graph layer to have a transparent background so as not to obscure the grid.
I've looked at using CAlayer as a sublayer, but it doesn't seem to provide a simple way to draw a line. CAShapeLayer seems a bit better, but it looks like it can only draw a single line. I want the grid to be composed of multiple lines.
What's the best approach and combination of objects to allow me to do this?
Thanks,
Reza
I'd have a CGLayerRef that was used for drawing the path into. For each new point I'd draw just the new segment. When the graph got to full width I'd create a new CGLayerRef and start drawing the new line segments into that.
What happens to the previous layer as it's drawn over by the new layer depends on how your graph is displayed, but you could clear the section which is now underneath the new layer (using CGContextSetBlendMode(context, kCGBlendModeClear);) or you could choose to blend them together in some other way.
Drawing the layers each time you make a change to the lines they contain is relatively cheap compared to drawing all of the line segments themselves.
Technically, there would also be CALayers used to manage the drawing of the CGLayerRefs to the screen (via the delegate relationship drawLayer:inContext:), but all of the line drawing is done using the CGLayerRefs context and then the CGLayerRef is drawn as a whole into the CALayers context (CGContextDrawLayerInRect(context, frame, backingCGLayer);).
In the Video Session 506 of Apples WWDC 2012 they showed a painting app which is made for high performance drawings (so the frame rate never gets below 30).
I tried to replicate the code but get stuck on multiple points.
What I am looking for is a basic drawing app (lines, Squares, Circles, bezier paths), which performs well even after hundreds of lines have been drawn.
The basic approach is to save the drawn lines (or circles bezierpaths etc) to an image after a certain numbers of them have been drawn, and then only refresh the new drawings, therefore not having to redraw all the already drawn lines.
But somehow I never get to a higher performance. How do I need to implement this? Do I need multiple layers? And how do I manage that not all layers in a view are redrawn, but only a certain sublayer?
If someone could provide me with a short example of a few lines drawn on an layer, then saving that layer to an image, an then drawing on top of that I would really appreciate it.
Thank you for any help to recreate the iPaint application, which is unfortunately not available for download from apple.
That is only half of the puzzle. The other half is to only refresh the minimum possible area of the view (via setNeedsDisplayInRect:). However, I have been through many different ways of drawing via Core Graphics. The caching is fine, but I don't use it anymore. I set the update rectangle as above, and then test each path before I stroke it (testing is fast, stroking is slow). If it is inside the update box, I stroke it, otherwise I ignore it.
I did not look at that session, but a traditional Quartz speedup has been to use CGLayers (not CALayers). You can think of a CGLayer as a cached drawing which may or may not be a bitmap (the system decides how best to cached it). If you have a backing bitmap context, you can use that as your "image" and draw the CGLayers into that (and then discard the layers) as you see fit. Read up on CGLayer (its in the Quartz documentation) and then see if this was what they talked about in that session.
When I draw lines and shapes etc I get the " current graphics context" in iOS.
What exactly though is " current graphics context" - I'm looking for the 30,000 foot description.
Right now I just copy and paste UI code, not exactly sure what it's doing.
A graphics context is the place where information about the drawing state is stored. This includes fill color, stroke color, line width, line pattern, winding rule, mask, current path, transparency layers, transform, text transform, etc. When using CoreGraphics calls, you specify the context to use to every single function. This means you can use multiple contexts at once, though typically you only use one. At the UIKit layer, there is the concept of a "current" graphics context, which is a graphics context that's used by all UIKit-level drawing calls (such as -[UIColor set] or UIBezierPath drawing). The current context is stored in a stack of contexts, so you can create a new context for some drawing, then when you finish with it the previous context is restored. Typically you get a context for free inside of -[UIView drawRect:] inside of CALayer display-related methods, but not otherwise.
It used to be that the "current" context was an application-wide global state, and therefore was not safe to touch outside of the main thread. As of iOS 4.0 (I believe), this became a thread-local state and UIKit-level drawing methods became safe to use on background threads.
The OS needs a place to save information, such as drawing state, which you don't want to specify in every single CG drawing command, such as in which bitmap or view to draw, the scale or other transform to use, the last color you specified, etc.
The context tells each CG call where to find all this "stuff" for your current drawing call. Give a different context to the exact same drawing call, and that call might draw to a different bitmap in a completely different view, with a different color, different scale, etc.
Basically it is a class in a platform (iOS, Android, JavaME and many others) that provides access to all the drawing/display capabilities provided for that platform. It varies a bit for different platforms of course, but this is the 30,000 foot description :)