I am coding a terrain which doesn’t even have an heightmap. It’s basically just a grid of quads + an 2dTextureArray which holds the N possible textures for each quad + a 2dTexture which is nothing but an array which stores, for each quad, whose texture should be used from the texture array.
Now, when I think about this in term of vertex shader, I should be able to calculate everything without having to pass real vertex data. Actually, all I’d have to pass is an array of indices to which quads I should render (ex. [1,2,3,5,9,23,40]), because from that single index I am able to derive pretty much everything.
I’ve tried looking for primitive id in glsl but looks like it’s something which is used in geometry shaders only, so I wonder if what I am saying makes sense at all and there’s some way to implement it. Any suggestion?
If you don’t wan’t tesselation or geometry shaders, I see two possible ways:
Go with a mesh (VBO) containing a quad for each tile and transmit the texture array index to the fragment shader either through a lookup in the vertex shader or directly storing that info as a vertex attrib (1 lookup in your index texture in the vertex shader and 1 lookup in the texture array in the fragment shader).
Just draw one big quad and solve everything in the fragment shader (which means 2 texture lookups / fragment with an array index depending on the outcome of the first texture lookup). Slower execution, much faster to code.
The VBO with multiple quads definitely is the way to go, infact that’s what I am using already.
Now… the problem is that, to specify a per-vertex texture index (thus having a U,V,W mapping coords, so to say) I should make every quad “unique”, while now I am sharing vertices.
What I am looking for is a way to derive the Texture Index in the vertex shader and pass it to the pixel shader.