I'm having trouble with additive blending, Im trying to draw particles onto a black background additively so they build up to white at the center. However a single particle (point) is saturating to white immediately. Any RGB values seem to saturate to 1, this is not what I expected.

Shader output color is: RGBA .5f, .1f, .1f, 1.0f

Clear Color is: 0,0,0,0

No Blending:

[attachment=35984:NoBlend.png]

Blending (GL.BlendFunc(BlendingFactorSrc.One, BlendingFactorDest.One);)

[attachment=35985:PinkBlended.png]

I was not expecting white, I was expecting the same red as the first image.

Am i misunderstanding additive blending? Or am I doing something else wrong? I've hacked my app to pieces trying to solve this.

I've checked the shader output, I can change the colors and it matches up outside of blending.

Blending is enabled, if i use a dark blue background with dark red particles I get pink/purple, its just 100% pin not dark pink.

Im only drawing once, I'm not drawing the same particles on top of themselves several times.

Its not just the particles, the whole scene whites out if I draw it with blending enabled.

I've tried rendering to the backbuffer, an fbo and a multisampled FBO, same thing.

Any other suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,

Arthor.

Additive blending is not just about the colours but about the alpha, right? So I would have expected to see a SRC_ALPHA in there somewhere.

Sorry for slow replies, I've been working and sleeping...

Are you sure you clear the framebuffer often enough and not drawing the same particles multiple times over themselves?

I'm clearing every frame right before I draw. I thought the same thing though, I have checked and I'm sure I'm only drawing the particles once and everything else is disabled.

Is this a single-buffered GL context?

Not 100% sure how to check but I think I'm using double buffering. Would this affect blending?

Additive blending is not just about the colours but about the alpha, right? So I would have expected to see a SRC_ALPHA in there somewhere.

My understanding is that ONE forces the alpha to be 1, resulting in 1 times the src and 1 times the dst colors being blended together so the alpha is still involved its just not affecting the colors. I'm going to have a play with different blending modes though and see if I can work around this, or if they give dodgy results too (I cant remember what I tried last night.).

I'm still struggling though any more advice is greatly welcomed.

Be sure to disable depth-testing if you want a proper additive blend.

For additive blending, I do something like this: (this is for iOS)

//Setup
glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);
glClearDepthf(10000.0f);
glEnable(GL_BLEND);
glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE);
glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);

//Loop
glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT|GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
[scene draw];