Would it be acceptable to use texture as a blob of data for armature transformation?

LapisSea · July 18, 2017, 8:51am

This is my first post here so sorry if I missed something obvious.

So I am really not keen of the ivec3 / ivec4 attributes that serve as pointers to matrix array uniform. I did some brainstorming and I figured why not use a grayscale texture the same as I would when reading a binary format file?
By that I mean something in terms of
(every keyword is 1 pixel aka 8bit or 16 bit number)
weightCount1, matrixId1, weight1, matrixId2, weight2… weightCount2, matrixId1, weight1, matrixId2, weight2…

code in question:

github.com

LapisSea/OpenGL-Bullet-engine/blob/master/res/shaders/modules/Armature.vsmd


#include "TextureBinary.smd"

uniform mat4 jointTransforms[<MAX_JOINT_TRANSFORMS>];

uniform BinTextureReader jointTransformData;

in int armaturePtr;


void transform(vec3 &position, vec3 &normal){
	int pos = armaturePtr;
	
	int weightCount = int(round(jointTransformData.getFloat(pos)));
	
	vec4 totalLocalPos = vec4(0.0);
	vec4 totalNormal = vec4(0.0);
	
	for(int i=0;i<weightCount;i++){

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github.com

LapisSea/OpenGL-Bullet-engine/blob/master/res/shaders/modules/TextureBinary.smd


struct BinTextureReader{
	
	ivec2 size;
	int channelCount;
	
	isampler1D data;
	
	float readInt(int &pos){
		return readValue(data, pos++, size.x, size.h, channelCount);
	}
	vec2 readVec2(int &pos){
		return vec2(readInt(pos),readInt(pos));
	}
	vec3 readVec3(int &pos){
		return vec3(readVec2(pos),readInt(pos));
	}
	vec4 readVec4(int &pos){
		return vec4(readVec3(pos),readInt(pos));
	}

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[i]
Notes:

[ul]
[li]I built a “shader loader” that finds #include “…” and replaces it with contents of a matching file that it is pointing to and I am using <NAME> as values that are replaced by values that are known only in java. (such as config values)[/li][li]I am using LWJGL 2 (java api for cross platform bindings for OpenGL)[/li][li]I am using opengl 3.2 profile[/li][/ul]
[/i]

I never used textures as raw data so i am not really sure how this would impact performance.

Thank you for your time!