Geometry shader + glDrawInstacedArrray ()

OpenGL OpenGL: Basic Coding
1

Hi, I have already used both geometry shaders and instanced rendering in some applications, but I was wondering if I could mix them

  • Basically, I would like to create a generic line rendering system, where I simply push vertices (vec3 position, vec4 color) to a buffer, and draw several lines in a single draw call (if 0, 1, 2, …, n are the vertices index, I would like to draw lines between (0, 1), (2, 3), …, but not (1, 2), (3, 4) …)

  • I think I can do it with a ‘line VAO’, which would hold two vertices : ((0, 0, 0), (0, 0, 1)) , draw instancely and apply a different transformation matrix in each instance.
    The VAO method would lead to many calculation cpu-side, to process the transformation matrix for each line: distance between the two points (line model scaling), angle between the standart model and the line (rotation), translate the model to the line origin

I would like to skip those calculation with a geometry shader, as coordinates are already ‘world-relative’ CPU-side

I hope it made sense and English was correct, maybe I’m searching the wrong way, so feel free to give me alternative solution. Thank you for your reading

2

That’s what you get from glDrawArrays(GL_LINES). No need for a geometry shader or instancing.

If you use a geometry shader, each invocation will get two vertices, i.e. 0 and 1, 2 and 3, 4 and 5, and so on.

Instancing lets you use a single element from an attribute array for all vertices of an instance, so it can reduce the size of the attribute arrays. But if you’re using a geometry shader, you could just use GL_POINTS where each “point” contains all of the information required for a line segment, and have the geometry shader convert each point to to a line segment.

In any case, there’s no reason why the two can’t be mixed.