originally i just wanted to make a patch that explains blending on the GPU.
then i fell into a hole of color spaces and hardly came out again. long story short - here is a patch that tries to explain some things around color blending and color spaces (which is something that anyone trying to be precise sooner or later runs into and pulls his/her hair out).
Stride_Rendering_Blending_ColorSpace.vl (127.9 KB)
what you will see in this patch:
i just wanted to proof how AlphaBlending works by manually implementing the calculation to Blend RGB and A values, like it is done on the GPU. Unfortunately it becomes hard to show this in a patch, because standard Stride works in linear space and the VVVV Editor (IOBoxes, etc.) handles colors in Gamma/sRGB space. so you cannot just put renderers and IOBoxes next to each other, because they will not look alike and are therefore confusing. so i had to go deeper and try to explain what conversion actually do happen and how to deal with the situation to get expected results.
to be honest: even though it took a lot of time i’m not yet really happy with the outcome as it is still kind of hard to read/follow. if you know what you are getting into, it might help you to understand but i doubt that it is a valuable resource for newbies. but that’s why i’m putting this here in the WIP category in the hope that with your feedback, error checking and suggestions we can make this a serious explainer patch. eventually i’d like to PR it for the help-patches of VVVV, VL.Addons, @tobyk 's intermediate tutorials, … whatever.
thanks for all the guys on the matrix for pushing me to release it anyways, even in the current state.
some more comments:
- to keep it “simple”, i was only using Stride.Rendering (to leave out everything that is related to PostFX/ColorMapping that you will experience with the standard Stride Engine Setup
- interestingly it seems that the RenderWindow and TextureWindow seem to handle 16Bit floatingpoint textures differently: while the RenderWindow displays them linearly/dark (on my system), the TextureWindow will not but with gamma correction (same goes for IOBoxes displaying this texture). not sure if this is a problem of my graphics driver or intended behaviour in VVVV. one more thing i had to wrap my head around - i find it confusing.
