gl-fbo

In WebGL, creating Framebuffer objects requires a lot of boilerplate. At minimum, you need to do the following:

1. Create a FramebufferObject
2. Bind it
3. Create a texture for the color buffer
4. Bind the texture
5. Initialize the texture
6. Attach texture to frame buffer
7. Create a render buffer for the depth buffer
8. Bind render buffer to initialize it
9. Initialize the render buffer
10. Attach render buffer to frame buffer

And it only gets more complicated once you try to add stencil buffers or depth textures. Even worse, each step of this above process involves one or more extremely verbose calls to WebGL API functions, each of which expects the inputs in some arbitrary order.

Clearly, the solution to all of this is to make a wrapper which is exactly what this module does.

Example

Try this in your browser if you have WebGL

var shell = require("gl-now")()
var createShader = require("gl-shader")
var createFBO = require("gl-fbo")
var ndarray = require("ndarray")
var fill = require("ndarray-fill")

var prevState, curState, updateShader, drawShader

shell.on("gl-init", function() {
  var gl = shell.gl
  
  //Turn off depth test
  gl.disable(gl.DEPTH_TEST)

  //Allocate buffers
  prevState = createFBO(gl, 512, 512)
  curState = createFBO(gl, 512, 512)
  
  //Initialize colors for prev_state
  var initial_conditions = ndarray(new Uint8Array(512*512*4), [512, 512, 4])
  fill(initial_conditions, function(x,y,c) {
    if(c === 3) {
      return 255
    }
    return Math.random() > 0.9 ? 255 : 0
  })
  prevState.color[0].setPixels(initial_conditions)

  //Create shaders
  var vert_src = "\
    attribute vec2 position;\
    varying vec2 uv;\
    void main() {\
      gl_Position = vec4(position,0.0,1.0);\
      uv = 0.5 * (position+1.0);\
    }"
  
  drawShader = createShader(gl, vert_src, "\
    precision mediump float;\
    uniform sampler2D buffer;\
    varying vec2 uv;\
    void main() {\
      gl_FragColor = texture2D(buffer, uv);\
    }")

  updateShader = createShader(gl, vert_src, "\
    precision mediump float;\
    uniform sampler2D buffer;\
    uniform vec2 dims;\
    varying vec2 uv;\
    void main() {\
      float n = 0.0;\
      for(int dx=-1; dx<=1; ++dx)\
      for(int dy=-1; dy<=1; ++dy) {\
        n += texture2D(buffer, uv+vec2(dx,dy)/dims).r;\
      }\
      float s = texture2D(buffer, uv).r;\
      if(n > 3.0+s || n < 3.0) {\
        gl_FragColor = vec4(0,0,0,1);\
      } else {\
        gl_FragColor = vec4(1,1,1,1);\
      }\
    }")
  
  //Create full screen triangle
  gl.bindBuffer(gl.ARRAY_BUFFER, gl.createBuffer())
  gl.bufferData(gl.ARRAY_BUFFER, new Float32Array([
    -1, -1,
    -1,  4,
     4, -1
  ]), gl.STATIC_DRAW)
  
  //Set up vertex pointers
  drawShader.attributes.position.location = updateShader.attributes.position.location
  updateShader.attributes.position.pointer()
  updateShader.attributes.position.enable()
})

shell.on("tick", function() {
  var gl = shell.gl
  
  //Switch to state fbo
  curState.bind()
  
  //Run update shader
  updateShader.bind()
  updateShader.uniforms.buffer = prevState.color[0].bind()
  updateShader.uniforms.dims = [512, 512]
  gl.drawArrays(gl.TRIANGLES, 0, 3)

  //Swap buffers
  var tmp = curState
  curState = prevState
  prevState = tmp
})

shell.on("gl-render", function(t) {
  var gl = shell.gl
  
  //Render contents of buffer to screen
  drawShader.bind()
  drawShader.uniforms.buffer = curState.color[0].bind()
  gl.drawArrays(gl.TRIANGLES, 0, 3)
})

Result:

Install

Install using npm:

npm install gl-fbo

API

var createFBO = require("gl-fbo")

Constructor

There is currently only one default way to create a Framebuffer object. You can construct a framebuffer using the following syntax:

var fbo = createFBO(gl, width, height[, options])

Creates a wrapped framebuffer object

• gl is a handle to a WebGL context

• width is the width of the framebuffer in pixels

• height is the height of the framebuffer in pixels

• options is an object containing the following optional properties:

  • options.float Use floating point textures (default false)
  • options.color The number of color buffers to create (default 1)
  • options.depth If fbo has a depth buffer (default: true)
  • options.stencil If fbo has a stencil buffer (default: false)

Methods

fbo.bind()

Binds the framebuffer object to the display.

fbo.dispose()

Destroys the framebuffer object and releases all associated resources

Properties

fbo.gl

A reference to the WebGL context

fbo.handle

A handle to the underlying Framebuffer object.

fbo.color

An containing gl-texture2d objects representing the buffers

fbo.depth

The depth/stencil component of the FBO. Stored as a gl-texture2d. If not present, is null.

Credits

(c) 2013 Mikola Lysenko. BSD