This thread got me interested in doing screen-space distortion effects in OpenGL. I'm fine on the theory, but actually implementing it in OpenGL leaves me a tad lost. 1. I've got a basic version working with two input textures, the distortion vectors and the actual image. I use the distortion vector to offset the texture coords of the actual image. Thats dead easy to do with GLSL, but is it possible (in some cross-vendor way) to do this for lower spec hardware? 2. I can't figure out how to do proper signed blending to compose multiple distortion maps into the final distortion texture. Is there an extension I'm overlooking? 3. How do people generate/create your distortion sprites/textures to use? So far I've been pre-processing a greyscale image into a distortion map (much like generating a normal map from a heightmap) but is that going to be suitable for everything? Cheers.

1) You can do it on GF3 and up using DSDT/DUDV textures. You need NV_TEXTURE_SHADER using OFFSET_TEXTURE_2D as texenv. It's a bit tricky to get it working. I sugest you look at nvidia for old GF3 demos. I'm using this extension for water disortion on GF3/4. I don't know about radeons. For cross vendor, I doubt you can do it.
2) Add signed?
3) I also use heightmaps and then convert them to DSDT or normalmaps.

Quote:Original post by _DarkWIng_
1) You can do it on GF3 and up using DSDT/DUDV textures. You need NV_TEXTURE_SHADER using OFFSET_TEXTURE_2D as texenv. It's a bit tricky to get it working. I sugest you look at nvidia for old GF3 demos. I'm using this extension for water disortion on GF3/4. I don't know about radeons. For cross vendor, I doubt you can do it.

Aye, thats what I suspected. Texture_shader looks totally evil to me, and I'm not really keen to use it if its nvidia only :(.

Quote:2) Add signed?

Could you give more detail? I'll swear blind that theres a blend mode for signed add, but much googling and searching always turns up texture environment signed-add stuff.

Quote:3) I also use heightmaps and then convert them to DSDT or normalmaps.

Great, at least I got one thing right. ;)

>>Aye, thats what I suspected. Texture_shader looks totally evil to me,<<

it can be done under glsl as well