Thursday, September 26, 2013

WebGL and the Learning Curve Saga Part III


My WebGL saga continues. If we are talking tortoise vs hare here, then I am certainly the tortoise member of this fable.

Slowly but surely we beat the thing into submission. Its not really bad, just badly documented, IMHO, like so much of the GL family. With WebGl we are definitely in a world circa 1982 or so. But MUCH faster than we ever would have achieved in 1982 no matter how rich you were. So we have vast power on all our desktops, but for some reason "we" have "chosen" to program it in a rather low level way. Well, hell, I like low level now and then. I like debugging this stuff that could have been documented but why bother, they can figure it out on their own.

So here is the kind of things I have been working on instead of figuring out how to end war or torture the rich or writing great fiction.

1. The Element Array Debacle

So, for example, if I had been paying attention, I would have noticed that the "element array" feature of WebGL (1) was defined to be a "short" or a 16 bit number. Warning alarms should have gone off in my head but its been a long time since I have programmed 16 bit machines.   Because its a short, the largest number of elements that one can therefore address is 64K vertices. In other words, it is useless for objects that are of modern complexity. Remember there are no higher order surfaces rendered directly by WebGL so we get the appearance of complexity by having a lot of triangles, I mean a lot of triangles, and maybe play with the shading. Maybe this limitation was noted in the documentation but I don't think so.

The result was that I had to rewrite the core of the object viewer to not use element arrays but just use the vertices, and the vertex attributes, etc. It took about 2 - 3 days and resulted in a much cleaner if slightly more verbose piece of code that could actually be maintained if it had to be.

2. The How Many of WHAT Exactly? Problem

The documentation says that you need to specify the number of things you are transferring. Well now, that could mean the number of triangles, or it could mean the number of vertices it takes to specify the triangles, or it could mean the number of bytes that it takes to hold the data, or ...

And the answer is: its the number of vertices you use to define the object. So the count you send is (3 * number of triangles) or (2 * number of lines). Maybe it was obvious to you, but it sure was not obvious to me from the documentation.

3. The Ongoing Normal Mystery

Look at the following picture. See anything odd? Well, its made out of flat triangles, and you should see flat surfaces. Ok, so its interpolating the normals, whats so odd about this? Its just that all the normals for a face (all triangles really) are all pointing the same direction. Unless WebGl is rebuilding the topology of the object by doing a giant vertex sort, there is no way it could be interpolating the normals.



So what is going on? No one knows, but I suspect that it is a bug in my shader that somehow does not compute the diffuse component correctly. The specular would normally and correctly be "smooth shaded", e.g. not show flat surfaces for the most part. So this maybe is just flat shaded, with transparency, and a specular. If that is not the problem then we are definitely in the twilight zone here.

"This war will be over one day".

You get extra credit for knowing what movie that is from and who said it.

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1. Where one specifies a line or triangle by keeping a list of vertex numbers rather than repeating the vertex itself over and over again.



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