Creating motion trails with glCopyTexSubImage2D

Hi, basically what I want to do is draw my scene, copy it to a texture, and then draw the texture before I draw the scene the next time. Basically what I want to do is create motion trails behind my objects. Here’s my code:

glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]);
glBegin(GL_QUADS);
glColor4f(1.f, 1.f, 1.f, 0.97f);
glTexCoord2f(0.0, 1.0); glVertex2f(0.f, windowH-textureSize);
glTexCoord2f(0.0, 0.0); glVertex2f(0.f, windowH);
glTexCoord2f(1.0, 0.0); glVertex2f(textureSize, windowH);
glTexCoord2f(1.0, 1.0); glVertex2f(textureSize, windowH-textureSize);
glEnd();

// draw some spheres or whatever
drawScene();

glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]);
glCopyTexSubImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, windowW, windowH);

This mostly works, but if I set the alpha value high (you’ll notice it’s at .97 above), the trails don’t fade out all the way to black. They sort of fade to a dark grey. Obviously I want them to disappear completely after a second or so.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why this happens. Here’s a magnified screenshot:

http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~e.newman/trails.jpg

I’ve got a GeForce 7800GT on WinXP.

Colors get rounded to the nearest value before writting to framebuffer.
round(16 * 97%) = round(15,52) = 16

Source:
http://www.opengl.org/documentation/spec…000000000000000

And by the way - if you blend your texture with framebuffer using alpha=0.97 then you get additional 3% of previous framebuffer content added to you final color.

ok, so is there any way around that? or what would be your recommended way for creating motion trails?

You can paint that texture multiple times - every time using alpha = 0.5. Painted 2 times gives 75%, 3 times gives 87,5%, and so on.
However, you will pay for this with increased datarate.
You could also use a very simple fragment shader if that’s not a problem.

The multiple texturing with .5 alpha doesn’t work - it obscures the trails completely (they’re gone after only a few frames). I want them to last for 60 frames or even longer. So I settled on using a shader which works fine on my desktop but my laptop doesn’t support it. Oh well.

Let’s try completely different approach… :wink:

Step 1:
glBlendFunc(GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_COLOR, GL_ZERO);
-now render texture that’s behind your scene

Step 2:
glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE);
glColor3ub(1, 1, 1);
-draw fullscreen quad (no texture)

Step 3:
glCopyTexSubImage2D(…); //copy framebuffer to your texture

Step 4:
glBlendFunc(GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_COLOR, GL_ZERO);
-now render texture that’s behind your scene

Step 5:
-now render scene

Step 6:
glCopyTexSubImage2D(…); //copy framebuffer to your texture

As you can see I inverse the texture 2 times - when it’s iversed I can use blending to add (1,1,1) to inversed texture wchich is eqivalent to adding (-1, -1, -1) to normal texture :slight_smile: