If you want to use any type of off screen rendering process, then frame buffers are probably the go for you. They allow you to render an entire scene, directly to a texture.
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If you want to use any type of off screen rendering process, then frame buffers are probably the go for you. They allow you to render an entire scene, directly to a texture.
Vertex Buffer Objects are used to store vertices, their indices and other information on the graphics card, for OpenGL to access directly. They are extremely fast and effecient, and are meant to supersede Display Lists. So lets use them for our terrain!
Just like our shadowing tutorial, this one uses the stencil buffer, but we are going to keep our color buffer enabled to allow us to keep our colors for a basic reflection.
With lighting, comes shadowing. This tutorial takes a basic stencil buffer, and uses it as a stencil to draw a basic shadow on to it.
While single buffering still displays our final image, it can cause artifacts. Double buffering lets us draw everything in a second buffer, and when finished, lets us transfer it to the screen for a smoother application.