I am building a 3D image viewer which has Three.JS plane geometries as placeholders with the images as their textures.
Now I want to add a black border around the image. The only way I have found yet to implement this is to add a new black plane geometry behind the image to be displayed. But this required whole-sale changes to my framework which I want to avoid.
WebGL's texture loading function gl.texImage2D has a parameter for border. But I couldn't find this exposed anywhere through Three.js and doubt that it even works the way I think it does.
Is there an easier way to add borders around textures?
You can use a temporary regular 2D canvas to render your image and apply any kind of editing/effects there, like paint borders and such. Then use that canvas image as a texture. Might be a bit of work, but you will gain a lot of flexibility styling your borders and other stuff.
I'm not near my dev machine and won't be for a couple of days, so I can't look up an example of my own. This issue contains some code to get you started: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/868
Related
I'm trying to recreate the barrel effect that can be seen on the camera mode picker below:
(source: androidnova.org)
Do I have to use OpenGL in order to achieve this effect? What is the best approach?
I found a great library on GitHub that can be used to achieve this effect (https://github.com/Ciechan/BCMeshTransformView), but unfortunately it doesn't support animation and is therefore not usable.
I bet Apple used CGMeshTransform. It's just like BCMeshTransform, except it is a private API and fully integrates with Core Graphics. BCMeshTransformView was born when a developer discovered this.
The only easy option I see is:
Use CALayer.transform, which is a CATransform3D. You can use this to simulate the barrel effect you want by adjusting the z position and y rotation of each item on the barrel. Also add a semitransparent dark gradient (CAGradientLayer) to the wheel to simulate the effect of choices getting darker towards the edges. This will be simple to do, but won't look as smooth and realistic as an actual 3D barrel. Maybe it will look good enough to create a convincing illusion though? (To enable 3D transforms, you need to enable depth by using view.layer.transform.m34 = 1/500.f or similar)
http://www.thinkandbuild.it/introduction-to-3d-drawing-in-core-animation-part-1/
The hardest option is using a custom OpenGL view that makes a barrel shape and applies your contents on top of it as a texture. I would expect that you run into most of the complexities behind creating BCMeshTransformView, and have difficulty supporting animations just like BCMeshTransformView did.
You may still be able to use BCMeshTransformView though. BCMeshTransformView is slow at processing content animations such as color changes, but is very fast at processing geometry changes. So you could use it to do a barrel effect, as long as you define the barrel effect entirely in terms of mesh geometry changes (instead of as content changes like using a scroll view or adjusting subview positions). You would need to do gesture handling + scrolling yourself instead of using UIScrollView though, which is tricky and tedious to get right.
Considering the options, I would want to fudge it by using 3D transforms, then move to other options only if I can't create a convincing illusion using 3D transforms.
I have been working with OpenGL in iOS, and setting the colors with glColor4f(r,g,b,a) and then drawing my own color on a white UIImageView. I basically have a brush, which is then moved around my user's touch, and then it paints the color onto the canvas. But this color needs to be water paint (like smudged color)
Does anyone understand/knows how to get a water color like this app does, and how the background UIImageView has a texture on it?
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hello-watercolor/id539414526?mt=8
or checkout water paint in this. http://www.fiftythree.com/paper
I created a bounty on this as I am really having a hard time to grasp how to derive such smooth flowing colors out of the normal colors. Even if you guys point me in the right direction, or to some sample code on how I can get the effect of water-paint, it would be really helpful ^_^
And as a bonus, it would be also be helpful if you can point out to me how to get canvas on which it is painted on looks realistic, and blended with the paint? Does Blending/GLSL have to do with any of this?
Is there any sample project on this?
If you are still struggling with the basics of getting realistic looking water colors working, you may want to experiment/prototype in photoshop first.
http://www.zoepiel.com/tutorials/watercolor/ shows some very effective tricks for creating watercolor images with simple tools.
The most interesting one is to multiply a group of watercolor layers with a greyscale watercolor paper image. The texture of the paper makes some parts remain white, and other parts saturate with color, just like real watercolor.
Each layer remains 'wet' in the sense that the colors within it blend, but the layers are 'dry' with respect to each other.
She also explains some of her brush and blur settings and shows what they do.
Once you can produce the desired effect in photoshop, you'll have clear specifications of what you want to do and you'll be quite a bit closer to programming it out.
Looking at the examples you posted, it looks like they are using a simple Gaussian Blur with a radius of double your brush size. This may be an incomplete solution, but it's at least the first level.
I have been working with OpenGL in iOS, and setting the colors with glColor4f(r,g,b,a) and then drawing my own color on a white UIImageView. I basically have a brush, which is then moved around my user's touch, and then it paints the color onto the canvas. But this color needs to be water paint (like smudged color)
Does anyone understand/knows how to get a water color like this app does, and how the background UIImageView has a texture on it?
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hello-watercolor/id539414526?mt=8
or checkout water paint in this. http://www.fiftythree.com/paper
I created a bounty on this as I am really having a hard time to grasp how to derive such smooth flowing colors out of the normal colors. Even if you guys point me in the right direction, or to some sample code on how I can get the effect of water-paint, it would be really helpful ^_^
And as a bonus, it would be also be helpful if you can point out to me how to get canvas on which it is painted on looks realistic, and blended with the paint? Does Blending/GLSL have to do with any of this?
Is there any sample project on this?
If you are still struggling with the basics of getting realistic looking water colors working, you may want to experiment/prototype in photoshop first.
http://www.zoepiel.com/tutorials/watercolor/ shows some very effective tricks for creating watercolor images with simple tools.
The most interesting one is to multiply a group of watercolor layers with a greyscale watercolor paper image. The texture of the paper makes some parts remain white, and other parts saturate with color, just like real watercolor.
Each layer remains 'wet' in the sense that the colors within it blend, but the layers are 'dry' with respect to each other.
She also explains some of her brush and blur settings and shows what they do.
Once you can produce the desired effect in photoshop, you'll have clear specifications of what you want to do and you'll be quite a bit closer to programming it out.
Looking at the examples you posted, it looks like they are using a simple Gaussian Blur with a radius of double your brush size. This may be an incomplete solution, but it's at least the first level.
So I am trying to get a very basic "flashlight"-style thing going in one of my games.
The way I was getting it to work, was having a layer on top of my game screen, and this layer would draw a black rectangle with ~ 80% opacity, creating the look of darkness on top of my game scene.
ccDrawSolidRect(ccp(0,0), ccp(480,320), ccc4f(0, 0, 0, 0.8));
What I want to do is draw this rectangle EVERYWHERE on the screen, except for around a cone of vision that will represent the "light source".
What this would create would be a dark overlay on top of everything except for the light, giving it the illusion of a torch/light/flashlight.
The only way I can foresee this happening is by using ccDrawSolidPoly(), but since the position of the light source changes, so would the vertices for the poly.
Any suggestions on how to achieve this would be great.
You can use ccDrawSolidPoly() and avoid having to manually update vertices. For this you can create a new subclass of CCNode representing your light object, and do your custom shape drawing in its -(void)draw method.
The ccDraw...() functions will draw relative to the local sprite coordinates, so you can then move and rotate your new sprite to suit your needs and cocos2d will do the vertices transformations for you.
Update: I found out that you might be better off subclassing CCDrawNode instead of CCNode, as it has some facilities for raw OpenGL drawing (OpenGL's vertexArrayBuffer and vertexBufferObject internal variables and a buffer for vertices, their colors and their texCoords). If your stuff is very simple, maybe subclassing the plain CCNode is enough.
Could a png be used instead as a mask, as the layer above
Like that binocular vision you sometimes see in cartoons?
Or a filter similar to a photoshop mask that darkens as it grows outwardly to wards the edge of the screen
Just a thought anyway...
A picture of more of what your trying to explain might be good too
I am creating a custom button that needs to be able to glow to a varying degree
How would I use these pictures to make a button that 'glows' the diamond when it is pressed, and have this glow gradually fade back to inert state?
I want to churn out several different colours of diamond as well... I am hoping to generate all different coloured diamonds from the same stock images presented here.
I would like to get my head around the basic methods available, in enough detail that I can see each one through and make a decision which path to take...
My tangled efforts so far... ( I will delete all of this, or move it into possibly several answers as a solution unfolds... )
I can see 3 potential solution paths:
GL
it looks as though GL has everything it takes to get complete fine-grained control over the process, although functions exposed by core graphics come tantalisingly close, and that would save several hundred lines of code spread over a bunch of source files, which seems a bit ridiculous for such a basic task.
core graphics, and core animation to accomplish the blending
documentation goes on to say
Anything underneath the unpainted samples, such as the current fill color or other drawing, shows through.
so I can chroma-key mask the left image, setting {0,0,0} ie Black as the key.
this at least secures a transparent background, now I have to work on making it yellow instead of grey.
so maybe I could have started instead with setting a yellow back colour for my image context, then use some CGContextSetBlendMode(...) to imprint the diamond on the yellow, THEN use chroma-key masking to get a transparent background
ok, this covers at least getting the basic unlit image on-screen
now I could overlay the sparkly image, using some blend mode, maybe I could keep it in its current greyscale state, and that would just boost the colours of the original
only problem with this is that it is a lot of heavy real-time blending
so maybe I could pre-calculate every image in the animation... this is looking increasingly mucky...
Cocos2D
if this allows me to set the blend mode to additive blending then I could just composite the glowing image over the original image with an appropriate Alpha setting.
After digging through a lot of documentation, the optimal solution seems to be to use core graphics functions to get the source images into a single 2-component GL texture, and then use GL to blend between them.
I will need to pass a uniform value glow_factor into the shader
The obvious solution might seem to simply use
r,g,b = in_r,g,b * { (1 - glow_factor) * inertPixel + glow_factor * shinyPixel }
(where inertPixel is the appropriate pixel of the inert diamond etc)...
it looks like I would also do well to manufacture my own sparkles and add them over the top; a gem should sparkle white irrespective of its characteristic colour.
After having looked at this problem a little more, I can see several solutions
Solution A -- store the transition from glow=0 to glow=1 as 60 frames in memory, then load the appropriate frame into a GL texture every time it is required.
this has an obvious benefit that a graphic designer could construct the entire sequence and I could load it in as a bunch of PNG files.
another advantage is that these frames wouldn't need to be played in sequence... the appropriate frame can be chosen on-the-fly
however, it has a potential drawback of a lot of sending data RAM->VRAM
this can be optimised by using glTexSubImage2D; several frames can be sent simultaneously and then unpacked from within GL... in fact maybe the entire sequence. if this is so, then it would make sense to use PVRT texture compression.
iOS: playing a frame-by-frame greyscale animation in a custom colour
Solution B -- load glow=0 and glow=1 images as GL textures, and manually write shader code that takes in the glow factor as a uniform and performs the blend
this has an advantage that it is close to the wire and can be tweaked in all sorts of ways. Also it is going to be very efficient. This advantage is that it is a big extra slice of code to maintain.
Solution C -- set glBlendMode to perform additive blending.
then draw the glow=0 image image, setting eg alpha=0.2 on each vertex.
then draw the glow=1 image image, setting eg alpha=0.8 on each vertex.
this has an advantage that it can be achieved with a more generic code structure -- ie a very general ' draw textured quad / sprite ' class.
disadvantage is that without some sort of wrapper it is a bit messy... in my game I have a couple of dozen diamonds -- at any one time maybe 2 or 3 are likely to be glowing. so first-pass I would render EVERYTHING ( just need to set Alpha appropriately for everything that is glowing ) and then on the second pass I could draw the glowing sprite again with appropriate Alpha for everything that IS glowing.
it is worth noting that if I pursue solution A, this would involve creating some sort of real-time movie player object, which could be a very useful reusable code component.