Applying textures on 3D geometric shapes - xna

I have a question that is bothering me for weeks! Is there any way of applying textures to 3D convex polygons, independently of their orientation in the 3D world. I am working with XNA 4.0 if it's relevant
I'm not expecting an easy way out, just a clean solution to solve my current problem. Does anyone made something similar to that?!
Thanks in advance, for your concern and time!

Automated generation texture coordinates for shapes is not easy... I have an idea that is not the best, but maybe it help you
if the shape lays in a plane you can create a square that contains the shape, is easy to get the texture coordinates in [0..1] range interpolating vertex positions inside the square in the plane.

Something similar is also here https://stackoverflow.com/a/19004944/2521214
worth looking also the whole thread (question and all comments including)
not just my answer

Related

HLSL How to properly outline a flat-shaded model

I have a question and hope you can help me with it. I've been busy making a game with xna and have recently started getting into shaders (hlsl). There's this shader that i like, use, and would like to improve.
The shader creates an outline by drawing the back faces of a model (in black), and translating the vertex along its normal. Now, for a smooth-shaded model, this is fine. I, however, am using flat-shaded models (I'm posting this from my phone, but if anyone is confused about what that means, I can upload a picture later). This means that the vertices are translated along the normal of its corresponding face, resulting in visible gaps between the faces.
Now, the question is: is there a way to calculate (either in the shader or in xna), how i should translate each vertex, or is the only viable option just making a copy of the 3d model, but with smooth shading?
Thanks in advance, hope you can educate me!
EDIT: Alternatively, I could load only a smooth-shaded model, and try to flat-shade it in the shader. That would, however, mean that I have to be able to find the normals of all vertices of the corresponding face, add their normals, and normalize the result. Is there a way to do this?
EDIT2: So far, I've found a few options that don't seem to work in the end: setting "shademode" in hlsl is now deprecated. Setting the fillmode to "wireframe" would be neat (while culling front faces), if only I would be able to set the line thickness.
I'm working on a new idea here. I could maybe iterate through vertices, find their position on the screen, and draw 2d lines between those points using something like the RoundLine library. I'm going to try this, and see if it works.
Ok, I've been working on this problem for a while and found something that works quite nicely.
Instead doing a lot of complex mathematics to draw 2d lines at the right depth, I simply did the following:
Set a rasterizer state that culls front faces, draws in wireframe, and has a slightly negative depth bias.
Now draw the model in all black (I modified my shader for this)
Set a rasterizer state that culls back faces, draws in fillmode.solid and has a 0 depth bias.
Now draw the model normally.
Since we can't change the thickness of wireframe lines, we're left with a very slim outline. For my purposes, this was actually not too bad.
I hope this information is useful to somebody later on.

How to detect PizzaMarker

did somebody tried to find a pizzamarker like this one with "only" OpenCV so far?
I was trying to detect this one but couldn't get good results so far. I do not know where this marker is in picture (no ROI is possible), the marker will be somewhere in the room (different ligthning effects) and not faceing orthoonal towards us. What I want - the corners and later the orientation of this marker extracted with the corners but first of all only the 5Corners. (up, down, left, right, center)
I was trying so far: threshold, noiseclearing, find contours but nothing realy helped for a good result. Chessboards or square markers are normaly found because of their (parallel) lines- i guess this can't help me here...
What is an easy way to find those markers?
How would you start?
Use other colorformat like HSV?
A step-by-step idea or tutorial would be realy helpfull. Cause i couldn't find tuts at the net. Maybe this marker isn't called pizzamarker -> does somebody knows the real name?
thx for help
First - thank you for all of your help.
It seems that several methods are usefull. Some more or less time expansive.
For me it was the easiest with a template matching but not with the same marker.
I used only a small part of it...
this can be found 5 times(4 times negative and one positive) in this new marker:
now I use only the 4 most negatives Points and the most positive and got my 5 points that I finaly wanted. To make this more sure, I check if they are close to each other and will do a cornerSubPix().
If you need something which can operate in real-time I'd go down the edge detection route and look for intersecting lines like these guys did. Seems fast and robust to lighting changes.
Read up on the Hough Line Transform in openCV to get started.
Addendum:
Black to White is the strongest edge you can have. If you create a gradient image and use the strongest edges found in the scene (via histogram or other) you will be able to limit the detection to only the black/white edges. Look for intersections. This should give you a small number of center points to apply Hough ellipse detection (or alternate) to. You could rotate in a template as a further check if you wish.
BTW.. OpenCV has Edge Detection, Hough transform and FitEllipse if you do go down this route.
actually this 'pizza' pattern is one of the building blocks of the haar featured used in the
Viola–Jones object detection framework.
So what I would do is compute the summed area table, or integral image using cv::integral(img) and then run exhaustive search for this pattern, on various scales (size dependant).
In each window you are using only 9 points (top-left, top-center, ..., bottom left).
You can train and use cvHaarDetectObjects to detect the marker using VJ.
Probably not the fastest method but it should work.
You can find more info on object detection methods using OpenCV here: http://opencv.willowgarage.com/documentation/object_detection.html

Directional Lights

I'm working on a game idea (2D) that needs directional lights. Basically I want to add light sources that can be moved and the light rays interact with the other bodies on the scene.
What I'm doing right now is some test where using sensors (box2d) and ccDrawLine I could achieve something similar to what I want. Basically I send a bunch of sensors from certain point and with raycast detect collisions, get the end points and draw lines over the sensors.
Just want to get some opinions if this is a good way of doing this or is other better options to build something like this?
Also I would like to know how to make a light effect over this area (sensors area) to provide a better looking light effect. Any ideas?
I can think of one cool looking effect you could apply. Put some particles inside the area where light is visible, like sparks shining and falling down very slowly, something like on this picture
Any approach to this problem would need to use collision detection anyway so your is pretty nice providing you have limited number of box2d objects.
Other approach when you have a lot of box2d objects I would think of is to render your screen to texture with just solid colors (should be fast) and perform ray tracing on that generated texture to find pixels that are going to be affected by light. That way you are limited to resolution not the number of box2d objects.
There is a good source code here about dynamic and static lights in a 2D space.
It's Ruby code but easy to understand so it shouldn't be long to port it to Obj-C/Cocos2D/box2D.
I really hope it will help you as it helped me.
Hm, interesting question. Cocos2D does provide some rather flexible masking effects. You could have a gradient mask that you lay over your objects, where its position depends on the position of the "light", thereby giving the effect that your objects were being coloured by the light.

OpenGL pixel manipulation for graphic

I want to simulate stroking a carpet, so you would have a graphic of a fury carpet and with your finger you can move around and stroke it. I need to shift pixels and create some fake distortion around where I am touching.
Anyone have any tips ?
Firstly I guess do I have enough to work with assuming I have 1 jpeg of the material. Not any skeleton or 3d file, just a flat image
this can be also improved with 'fur rendering'
I've some examples:
http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/
http://www.xbdev.net/directx3dx/specialX/Fur/index.php
or new demo from NVidia:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fp5N-pOxKA - around 35sec
Sounds like a typical task to be solved with OpenGL shaders.
As MrTJ says: Shaders is your key here.
Apart from your diffuse use a second texture as your "carpet" map that you modify. Maybe use the like a normal map, storing a directional vector per texel.
Use your "carpet" map in your shader and distort however you like to create your desired carpet effect.

How to parse image for border vertices? Complex object geometry (farseer physics)

How could I create body vertices by scanning image and detecting it's shape (of it's non-transparent pixels)?
I wanna create complex geometry, and I actually have no real idea where to start, so any advice would be highly appreciated. Accepted answer would most likely be the one that explains the topmost idea.
Thanks in advance
FarseerPhysics has functionality for converting textures into polygons (scroll down to Texture to Polygon) suitable to create bodies from.
I think that's what you're looking for?
Be warned though, the nature of texture to polygon conversions is an inherently dangerous and complex thing to carry out, if your image isn't in pristine condition (i.e. it has a lot of half opaque pixels and opacity based blurring) you will get unexpected results.

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