Efficiently rendering to 3D texture
- by TravisG
I have an existing depth texture and some other color textures, and want to process the information in them by rendering to a 3D texture (based on the depth contained in the depth texture, i.e. a point at (x/y) in the depth texture will be rendered to (x/y/texture(depth,uv)) in the 3D texture).
Simply doing one manual draw call for each slice of the 3D texture (via glFramebufferTextureLayer) is terribly slow, since I don't know beforehand to what slice of the 3D texture a given texel from one of the color textures or the depth texture belongs. This means the entire process is effectively
for each slice
for each texel in depth texture
process color textures and render to slice
So I have to sample the depth texture completely per each slice, and I also have to go through the processing (at least until to discard;) for all texels in it.
It would be much faster if I could rearrange the process to
for each texel in depth texture
figure out what slice it should end up in
process color textures and render to slice
Is this possible? If so, how?
What I'm actually trying to do: the color textures contain lighting information (as seen from light view, it's a reflective shadow map). I want to accumulate that information in the 3D texture and then later use it to light the scene. More specifically I'm trying to implement Cryteks Light Propagation Volumes algorithm.
