Question

I’m currently working on a camera app for the iPhone in which I take the camera input, convert that to an OpenGL texture and then map it onto a 3D Object (currently a plane in perspective projection, for the sake of simplicity).
After mapping the camera input to this 3D plane I then render this 3D scene to a texture which is then used as a new texture for a plane in orthographic space (to apply additional filters in my fragment shader).

As long as I keep everything in orthographic projection, the resolution of my render texture is pretty high. But from the moment I put my plane in perspective projection the resolution of my render texture is very low.

Comparison:

As you can see, the last image has a very low resolution compared to the other two. So I’m guessing I’m doing something wrong.

I’m currently not using multisampling on any of my framebuffers and I’m in doubt if I will need it anyway to fix my problem since the orthographic scene works perfectly.

The textures I render into are 2048×2048 (will eventually be outputted as an image to the iPhone camera roll).

Here are some parts of my source code that I think might be relevant:

Code to create the framebuffer that gets outputted to the screen:

// Color renderbuffer
glGenRenderbuffers(1, &colorRenderBuffer);
glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, colorRenderBuffer);
[context renderbufferStorage:GL_RENDERBUFFER 
                 fromDrawable:(CAEAGLLayer*)glView.layer];

// Depth renderbuffer
glGenRenderbuffers(1, &depthRenderbuffer);
glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, depthRenderbuffer);
glRenderbufferStorage(GL_RENDERBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT16, width, height);

// Framebuffer
glGenFramebuffers(1, &defaultFrameBuffer);
glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, defaultFrameBuffer);

// Associate renderbuffers with framebuffer
glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, 
      GL_RENDERBUFFER, colorRenderBuffer);
glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, 
      GL_RENDERBUFFER, depthRenderbuffer);

TextureRenderTarget class:

void TextureRenderTarget::init()
{
    // Color renderbuffer
    glGenRenderbuffers(1, &colorRenderBuffer);
    glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, colorRenderBuffer);
    glRenderbufferStorage(GL_RENDERBUFFER, GL_RGB8_OES, 
           width, height);

    // Depth renderbuffer
    glGenRenderbuffers(1, &depthRenderbuffer);
    glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, depthRenderbuffer);
    glRenderbufferStorage(GL_RENDERBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT16, 
           width, height);

    // Framebuffer
    glGenFramebuffers(1, &framebuffer);
    glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, framebuffer);

    // Associate renderbuffers with framebuffer
    glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, 
          GL_RENDERBUFFER, colorRenderBuffer);
    glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, 
          GL_RENDERBUFFER, depthRenderbuffer);

    // Texture and associate with framebuffer
    texture = new RenderTexture(width, height);
    glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, 
          GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture->getHandle(), 0);

    // Check for errors
    checkStatus();
}

void TextureRenderTarget::bind() const
{
    glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, framebuffer);
    glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, colorRenderBuffer);
}



void TextureRenderTarget::unbind() const
{
    glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0);
    glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, 0);
}

And finally, a snippet on how I create the render texture and fill it with pixels:

void Texture::generate()
{
    // Create texture to render into
    glActiveTexture(unit);
    glGenTextures(1, &handle);
    glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, handle);

    // Configure texture
    glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR);
    glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR);
    glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE);
    glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE);
}

void Texture::setPixels(const GLvoid* pixels)
{
    glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, width, height, 0, GL_RGBA, 
         GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, pixels);
    updateMipMaps();
}

void Texture::updateMipMaps() const
{
    glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, handle);
    glGenerateMipmap(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
}

void Texture::bind(GLenum unit)
{
    this->unit = unit;

    if(unit != -1)
    {
        glActiveTexture(unit);
        glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, handle);
    }
    else
    {
        cout << "Texture::bind -> Couldn't activate unit -1" << endl;
    }
}

void Texture::unbind()
{
    glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0);    
}

Answer 1

I finally solved my problem by merging the first and second step of my rendering process.

The first step used to crop and flip the texture of the camera and render it to a new texture. Then this newly rendered texture is mapped onto a 3D plane and the result is rendered to a new texture.

I merged these two steps by changing the texture coordinates of my 3D plane so that I can use the original camera texture directly onto this plane.

I don’t know what the exact reason is what was causing this loss of quality between the two rendered textures, but as a hint for the future: don’t render to texture and reuse that result for a new render to texture. Merging all this together is better for performance and it also avoids color shifting issues.