30061
Question:
I'm repeating a texture in the vertex shader (for storage, not for repeating at the spot). Is this the right way? I seem to lose precision somehwere.
varying vec2 texcoordC;
texcoordC = gl_MultiTexCoord0.xy;
texcoordC *= 10.0;
texcoordC.x = mod(texcoordC.x, 1.0);
texcoordC.y = mod(texcoordC.y, 1.0);
ADDED: I then save (storage) the texcoord in the color, print it to the texture and later use that texture again. When I retrieve the color from the texture, I find the texcoords and use them to apply a texture in postprocess. There's a reason I want it this way, that I won't go into. I get it that the texcoords will be limited by the color's precision, that is alright as my texture is 256 in width and height.
I know normally I would set the texcoords with glTexcoord2f to higher than 1.0 to repeat (and using GL_REPEAT), but I am using a modelloader which I am to lazy to edit, as I think it is not necessary/not the easiest way.
Answer1:There are (at least) two ways in which this could go wrong:
Firstly yes, you will lose precision. You are essentially taking the fractional part of a floating point number, after scaling it up. This essentially throws some of the number away.
Secondly, this probably won't work anyway, not for most typical uses. You are trying to tile a texture per-vertex, but the texture is interpolated across a polygon. So this technique could tile the texture differently on different vertices of the same polygon, resulting in a bit of a mess.
i.e.
If vertex1 has a U of 1.5 (after scaling), and vertex2 has a U of 2.2, then you expect the interpolation to give increasing values between those points, with the half-way point having a U of 1.85.
If you take the modulo at each vertex, you will have a U of 0.5, and a U of 0.2 respectively, resulting in a <em>decreasing</em> U, and a half-way point with a U of 0.35...
Textures can be tiled just be enabling tiling on the texture/sampler, and using coordinates outside the range 0->1. If you really want to increase sampling accuracy and have a large amount of tiling, you need to wrap the UV coordinates uniformly across whole polygons, rather than per-vertex. i.e. do it in your data, not in the vertex shader.
For your case, where you're trying to output the UV coordinates into a buffer for some later purpose, you could clamp/wrap the UVs in the <em>pixel</em> shader. So multiply up the UV in the vertex shader, interpolate it across the polygon correctly, and then apply the modulo only when writing to the buffer.
However I still think you'll have precision issues as you're losing all the sub-pixel information. Whether or not that's a problem for the technique you're using, I don't know.
