Drawing un-antialiased polygons on HTML5 canvas - javascript

I'm trying to create a polygon that has un-antialiased, unfeathered, unsoftened, etc. edges/sides. My goal is to have a polygon that has visible pixelated edges like an old-school game would. I found that images do not use antialiasing with proper settings, but I'd like to use lineTo and paths to create the polygon (because I need to be able to change the colors etc).
Using scaling (setting the canvas size one fourth of the actual size and scaling the canvas up with CSS styling), translating the shape by 0.5 pixels and setting the image-rendering property to pixelated results in this:
https://jsfiddle.net/6gbo7x3g/4/
Even though the result is better than without the tricks, you can still see antialiasing. The browser support isn't great either, as pixelated image rendering isn't supported in Safari. Here is a screenshot from Chrome of the canvas above:
image of antialiased polygon
How can I create a polygon (that has diagonal edges) un-antialiased? There will be multiple similar polygons, so drawing every pixel by hand would be too resource-intensive.
Questions like How can I keep the edge pixels of lines from being semi-transparent?, stackoverflow.com/a/45749684/1693593 and stackoverflow.com/a/18551803/1693593 aren't duplicates, because they only apply to scenarios where pixel-by-pixel rendering is applicable (in this scenario it is too resource-intensive). I asked this question, because other questions date almost four years back, and surely the web standards have changed since then.

Related

Google Charts line thickness(& Sharpness) differ

I just found that there are some difference in the line thickness (and sharpness) even tough their line thickness property has be set to the same. I have searched all over the Google Charts webpage. But I could find nothing. How to solve this kind of error ?
Check all the lines you find the difference. Some will blur and other will be sharp.
This isn't really specific to Google charts, its an artefact of Anti aliasing. In brief, the pixels in most computer displays are relatively large, which makes precise display difficult. Anti aliasing uses shading to make an image look like it was rendered with more pixels than are actually available, at the cost of being blurry. When you have some lines that match the real pixels, you will see the difference.
There doesn't seem to be an option to turn off antialiasing that I can see in the Google Charts documentation.
If you are exporting images (e.g. PNGs) you could export at a larger size and reduce the image back at a non-integral scale: that way all lines will be blurred roughly equally as no source pixel will exactly line up with a destination pixel.
If you are trying to display SVGs, you might be able to turn off antialiasing using CSS styles. (Maybe try this)

Wraparound for HTML5 Canvas: How to Get (Static) Shapes to Continue around Edges of Canvas

I'm trying to draw a tiled background using Javascript on an HTML5 canvas, but it's not working because shapes that intersect the edges of the canvas don't wrap around to the other side. (Just to be clear: these are static shapes--no motion in time is involved.) How can I get objects interrupted by one side of the canvas to wrap around to the other side?
Basically I'm looking for the "wraparound" effect that many video games use--most famously Asteroids; I just want that effect for a static purpose here. This page seems to be an example that shows it is possible. Note how an asteroid, say, on the right edge of the screen (whether moving or not) continues over to the left edge. Or for that matter, an object in the corner is split between all four corners. Again, no motion is necessarily involved.
Anyone have any clues how I might be able to draw, say, a square or a line that wraps around the edges? Is there perhaps some sort of option for canvas or Javascript? My google searches using obvious keywords have come up empty.
Edit
To give a little more context, I'm basing my work off the example here: Canvas as Background Image. (Also linked from here: Use <canvas> as a CSS background.) Repeating the image is no problem. The problem is getting the truncated parts of shapes to wrap around to the other side.
I'm not sure how you have the tiles set-up, however, if they are all part of a single 'wrapper' slide which has it's own x,x at say 0,0, then you could actually just draw it twice, or generate a new slide as needed. Hopefully this code will better illustrate the concept.
// Here, the 'tilegroup' is the same size of the canvas
function renderbg() {
tiles.draw(tiles.posx, tiles.posy);
if(tiles.posx < 0)
tiles.draw(canvas.width + tiles.posx, tiles.posy);
if(tiles.posx > 0)
tiles.draw(-canvas.width + tiles.posx, tiles.posy);
}
So basically, the idea here is to draw the groupings of tiles twice. Once in it's actual position, and again to fill in the gap. You still need to calculate when the entire group leaves the canvas completely, and then reset it, but hopefully this leads you in the correct direction!
You could always create your tillable image in canvas, generate a toDataUrl(), and then assign that data url as a background to something and let CSS do the tiling.. just a thought.
Edit: If you're having trouble drawing a tillable image, you could create a 3*widthx3*width canvas, draw on it as regular (assuming you grab data from the center square of data as the final result), and then see if you can't draw from subsets of the canvas to itself. Looks like you'd have to use:
var myImageData = context.getImageData(left, top, width, height);
context.putImageData(myImageData, dx, dy);
(with appropriate measurements)
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTML/Canvas/Pixel_manipulation_with_canvas/
Edit II: The idea was that you'd have a canvas big enough that has a center area of interest, and buffer areas around it big enough to account for any of the shapes you may draw, like so:
XXX
XCX
XXX
You could draw the shapes once to this big canvas and then just blindly draw each of the areas X around that center area to the center area (and then clear those areas out for the next drawing). So, if K is the number of shapes instead of 4*K draws, you have K + 8 draws (and then 8 clears). Obviously the practical applicability of this depends on the number of shapes and overlapping concerns, although I bet it could be tweaked. Depending upon the complexity of your shapes it may make sense to draw a shape 4 times as you originally thought, or to draw to some buffer or buffer area and then draw it's pixel data 4 times or something. I'll admit, this is some idea that just popped into my head so I might be missing something.
Edit III: And really, you could be smart about it. If you know how a set of objects are going to overlap, you should only have to draw from the buffer once. Say you got a bunch of shapes in a row that only draw to the north overlapping region. All you should need to do is draw those shapes, and then draw the north overlapping region to the south side. The hairy regions would be the corners, but I don't think they really get hairy unless the shapes are large.... sigh.. at this point I probably need to quiet down and see if there's any existing implementations of what I speak out there because I'm not sure my writing off-the-cuff is helping anybody.

Transparency Face-Jumping?

I've been working on a WebGL project that runs on top of the Three.js library. I am rendering several semi-transparent meshes, and I notice that depending on the angle you tilt the camera, a different object is on top.
To illustrate the problem, I made a quick demo using three semi-transparent cubes. When you rotate the image past perpendicular to the screen, the second half of the smallest cube "jumps" and is no longer visible. However, shouldn't it still be visible? I tried adjusting some of the blending equations, but that didn't seem to make a difference.
What I'm wondering is whether or not this is a bug in WebGL/Three, or something I can fix. Any insight would be much appreciated :)
Well, that's something they weren't able to solve when they invented all this hardware accelerated graphics business and sounds like we'll have to deal with this for a long while.
The issue here is that graphic cards do not sort the polygons, nor objects. The graphics card is "dumb", you tell it to draw an object and it will draw the pixels that represent it and also, in another non-visible "image" called zbuffer (or depthbuffer), will draw the pixels that represent the object but instead of color it will draw the distance to the camera for each pixels. Any other objects that you draw afterwards, the graphics card will check if the distance to the camera for each pixel, and if it's farther, it won't draw it (unless you disable the check, that is).
This speeds up things a lot and gives you nice intersections between solid objects. But it doesn't play well with transparency. Say that you have 2 transparent objects and you want A to be drawn behind B. You'll need to tell the graphics card to draw A first and then B. This works fine as long as they're not intersecting. In order to draw 2 transparent objects intersecting then the graphics would have to sort all the polygons, and as the graphics card doesn't do that, then you'll have to do it.
It's one of these things that you need to understand and specifically tweak for your case.
In three.js, if you set material.transparent = true we'll sort that object so it's drawn before (earlier) other objects that are in front. But we can't really help you if you want to intersect them.

RaphaelJS -- vector or not?

I'm trying to place a circle at 50% of the width of the paper using RaphaelJS, is this possible without first doing the math (.5 * pixel width)? I want to simply be able to place an element at 50% of its container's width, is this even possible with the current Raphael API?
Raphael claims to be able to draw vector graphics, and yet it seems everything in the API is pixel-based. How can you draw a vector image using pixels? That seems 100% contradictory.
Likewise, as I understand vector art, it retains the same dimensions regardless of actual size. Is this not one of the primary reasons to use vector graphics, that it doesn't matter if it's for screen, print or whatever, it will always be the same scale? Thus, I'm further
confused by the need for something like ScaleRaphael; just seems like such functionality is part and parcel to creating vector graphics. But, perhaps I just don't understand vector graphics?
It just doesn't seem like an image that is created with absolute pixel dimensions and unable to be resized natively qualifies as a vector image. That, or I'm missing a very large chunk of the API here.
Thanks in advance for any help. I've attempted to post this twice now to the RaphaelJS Google Group, but I guess they are censoring it for whatever reason because I've been waiting for it to appear since last week and still no sign of my posts (although other new posts are showing up).
Using pixel values to define shape positions/dimensions does not make it a non-vector shape. Take for instance Adobe Illustrator - this is a vector product and yet you can still see that the properties for each object shows the positions and dimensions is pixels.
A basic explanation of vector graphics would be like this, taking a rectangle as an example:
A vector rectangle will have a number of properties such as x, y,
width and height. These properties can be specified in pixels. The
difference with vector (as opposed to raster) is that these pixel
properties are only used to determine how the shape is drawn. So when
the display is rendered (refreshed) the "system" can redrawn the shape
using the same properties without effecting the quality of the resize.
A raster image however will hold a lot more information (i.e. the
exact value of each pixel used to form the shape/rectangle)
If the word "pixel" makes you think it is contradictory, just remeber everything on a computer screen is rendered in pixels. Even vector graphics have to be converted to "raster" as some point in the graphics pipeline.
If you are worried about having to use a calculation (0.5 * width) then just remember that something has to do that calculation, and personally I would happily handle this simple step myself.
After all that, you should just calculate size and position in pixels based on the size of your "paper" element and feed those values in Raphael for creating the shape.

Canvas overlapping elements

I have a canvas animation that sometimes redraws the exact same element over another (it is a long story why this is necessary) but it happens, and it happens often enough.
Now I assumed that drawing an element (using a context path and the stroke method) over an existing exact replica of the image should do nothing at all to my animation. Instead it draws over the past image and blurs all the sides (as if it didn't exactly draw at the same location.
Please let me know if there is a way to fix this
Thanks
This is happening because canvas strokes are anti-aliased. In a practical sense you're drawing some semi-opaque pixels over some other semi-opaque pixels, and where the pixels are overlaid their opacities are added together. I don't think you can (currently) force the canvas object to turn off anti-aliasing on strokes, so you may just have to live with it. Is it that big of a problem?
http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/303/canvasl.png
EDIT: I guess you could try using PNGs with transparent backgrounds for your markers, instead of drawing them with strokes. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial/Using_images

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