sampler2DShadow

I defined a pbuffer to contain depth values for a rendered scene, this pbuffer is bound as texture, but how do I access the depth values within my fragment program.

I read something about a comparison value in the q coordinate of the vec3 that accesses the sampler but all I want to do is to read the depth value from my texture.

How do I do this, this is my attempt …

uniform sampler2DShadow depthMap;

void main()
{
	vec4 col = shadow2D(depthMap, vec3(gl_FragCoord.x, gl_FragCoord.y, 0.0));
	gl_FragColor = vec4(col.x, col.y, col.z, 1.0);
	gl_FragDepth = gl_FragCoord.z;
}

If you just want to read the depth value, it’s probably safer to use texture2D instead of shadow2D. shadow2D reads the depth value like texture2D, but then also does a depth comparison.

If you don’t have your shadow texture set up for depth comparisons, then I think shadow2D will behave just like texture2D by not doing the comparison. However, this is not a clean way to do things and I don’t know if you can expect all drivers to behave this way.

So you mean it is OK if I use sampler2D instead of sampler2DShadow.

And how is the depth value stored - every color component contains the same depth value or how?

thanks

I haven’t read anything that says GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT textures must be accessed with samplerDShadow. samplerD should also work. There’s one good way to find out, though.

A depth texture is stored as one channel, but that same value is duplicated into all four channels when you read it into your shader. At least, that’s what I have observed. Again, just try it and see what you get.

thank you again I will try and see

mogumbo is correct, when you read from a depth texture, the r, g, b, a (or x, y, z, w, etc) components will all be set to the same value.
The value itself will lie in the range 0 to 1, with 0 being the near clip plane, and 1 the far clip plane, but note that the value is non-linear. If you want to convert it to a true scene depth value, you’ll need to pull a few values out of the projection matrix and do some calculations.

Peter

what do you mean by that ?

The first sentance, or the second sentance?

Peter

the second one the transformations …

my idea was to use the depth value in conjunction with some point in viewport coordinates (x,y) to form (x,y,depth,1) and transform them back to world space

Originally posted by powerpad:
my idea was to use the depth value in conjunction with some point in viewport coordinates (x,y) to form (x,y,depth,1) and transform them back to world space
That’s a better (amd more generic) way of putting it

What I was trying to say is that if you don’t need the world x/y coordinates, you can transform just the Z, and for that you just need a two values from the projection matrix.

Either way, if I remember correctly, the Z value ends up in the range -1 and 1 after being multiplied by the projection matrix (anything else is outside the near and far clipping planes). This value is then mapped to the range 0 - 1 before it’s stored in the depth buffer. So it you read a depth buffer value, you will need to do a

z = z * 2 - 1

before you reproject it back to world coordinates.

Peter

I do remember something similar (the transformation that does the viewport mapping does something like this this)

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