Use instancing to produce several copies of one scene packed in one texture

OpenGL OpenGL: Advanced Coding
1

Hello everyone !

So my question is a little bit tricky. I am working on a global illumination algorithm. For that algorithm to work, I want to compute a large texture that will contain several copies of the initial scene viewed from different positions in space. This big texture will contain every copy in a packed way. Here is a link to an example of what I want to achieve : http://imgur.com/a/XYdqB

The texture is split in 32 by 32 and each group is the scene (here the Cornell Box) viewed from one point.

Anyway, to speed up the process, I want to use instancing. I thought about doing the following (all this happens in the vertex shader) :

  1. The instance count is 32*32 : we will draw the scene as many times as there are groups in the megatexture
  2. Given the gl_InstanceID, I know in which group I am writing into. I get the camera data related to the point on which to render the scene.
  3. I place all my vertices in camera space.
  4. Then I need to place all my vertices in NDC space (since the vertex shader expects vertices in clip-space but I make sure every W = 1.0f so that clip space and NDC space are the same).

The tricky part is part 4. Indeed, I need to know the NDC-space-size of one group (this is easy), then take my Camera Space vertices, shrink them and translate them to the right position.

This is already giving me strange behavior when I do this and I wanted to know if there was anything important to take into consideration here.

Moreover, I thought there was going to be some troubles with clipping. Indeed, every vertex in clip-space that should be clipped will not if I shrink it. Therefore, I need to mimic the clipping behavior myself. I cannot think of an obvious way to do that first, and second I know it is important to avoid branching therefore my solution would avoid this too.

I provided sample code of my vertex shader for you to see. Hopefully this will make everything clearer :


void main()
{
	//
	// NOTE : Computing micro view matrix
        // [...]


	mat4 MicroMVP = MicroProjection * MicroView * ObjectMatrix;

	vec4 NDCPosition = MicroMVP * vec4(Position, 1.0f);
	NDCPosition = NDCPosition / NDCPosition.w;
	//NDCPosition.w = 1.0f;

	float Scaling = (2.0f / float(PatchSizeInPixels)); // PatchSizeInPixels is 32 in my case

	NDCPosition.xy *= Scaling;
	NDCPosition.xy -= (1.0f - Scaling) * vec2(1.0f, 1.0f);
	NDCPosition.xy += PixelCoordInPatch * Scaling;

	gl_Position = NDCPosition;
}

Does anyone is familiar with this and have any tips and advices to tackle this problem ? I hope this is clear and I am ready to answer any questions to make it even clearer.

Thanks a lot !