OpenGL Programming Guide

Chapter 5Color

Computer Color

On a color computer screen, the hardware causes each pixel on the screen to emit different amounts of red, green, and blue light. These are called the R, G, and B values. They're often packed together (sometimes with a fourth value, called alpha, or A), and the packed value is called the RGB (or RGBA) value. (See "Blending" for an explanation of the alpha values.) The color information at each pixel can be stored either in RGBA mode, in which the R, G, B, and possibly A values are kept for each pixel, or in color-index mode, in which a single number (called the color index) is stored for each pixel. Each color index indicates an entry in a table that defines a particular set of R, G, and B values. Such a table is called a color map.

In color-index mode, you might want to alter the values in the color map. Since color maps are controlled by the window system, there are no OpenGL commands to do this. All the examples in this book initialize the color-display mode at the time the window is opened by using routines from the auxiliary library, which is described in detail in Appendix E .

Different graphics hardware varies greatly in both the size of the pixel array and the number of colors that can be displayed at each pixel. On a given graphics system, every pixel has the same amount of memory for storing its color, and all the memory for all the pixels is called the color buffer. The size of a buffer is usually measured in bits, so an 8-bit buffer could store 8 bits of data (256 possible different colors) for each pixel. The size of the possible buffers varies from machine to machine. (See Chapter 10 for more information.)

The R, G, and B values can range from 0.0 (none) to 1.0 (full intensity). For example, R = 0.0, G = 0.0, and B = 1.0 represents the brightest possible blue. If R, G, and B are all 0.0, the pixel is black; if all are 1.0, the pixel is drawn in the brightest white that can be displayed on the screen. Blending green and blue creates shades of cyan. Blue and red combine for magenta. Red and green create yellow. To help you create the colors you want from the R, G, and B components, look at the color cube shown in Figure J-12 . The axes of this cube represent intensities of red, blue, and green. A black-and-white version of the cube is shown in Figure 5-1 .

Figure 5-1 : The Color Cube in Black and White

The commands to specify a color for an object (in this case, a point) can be as simple as this:

glColor3f (1.0, 0.0, 0.0);  /* the current RGB color is red: */
                            /* full red, no green, no blue. */
glBegin (GL_POINTS);
    glVertex3fv (point_array);
glEnd ();

In certain modes (for example, if lighting or texturing calculations are performed), the assigned color might go through other operations before arriving in the framebuffer as a value representing a color for a pixel. In fact, the color of a pixel is determined by a lengthy sequence of operations.

Early in a program's execution, the color-display mode is set to either RGBA mode or color-index mode. Once the color-display mode is initialized, it can't be changed. As the program executes, a color (either a color index or an RGBA value) is determined on a per-vertex basis for each geometric primitive. Either a color you've explicitly specified for a vertex is used or, if lighting is enabled, the transformation matrices interact with the surface normals and other material properties to determine the vertex's color. In other words, a red ball with a blue light shining on it looks different from the same ball with no light on it. (See Chapter 6 for details.) After the relevant lighting calculations are performed, the chosen shading model is applied. As explained in "Specifying a Color and a Shading Model," you can choose flat or smooth shading, each of which has different effects on the eventual color of a pixel.

Next, the primitives are rasterized, or converted to a two-dimensional image. Rasterizing involves determining which squares of an integer grid in window coordinates are occupied by the primitive and then assigning color and other values to each such square. A grid square along with its associated values of color, z (depth), and texture coordinates is called a fragment. Pixels are elements of the framebuffer; a fragment comes from a primitive and is combined with its corresponding pixel to yield a new pixel. Once a fragment is constructed, texturing, fog, and antialiasing are applied - if they're enabled - to the fragments. After that, any specified alpha blending, dithering, and bitwise logical operations are carried out using the fragment and the pixel already stored in the framebuffer. Finally, the fragment's color value (either color index or RGBA) is written into the pixel and displayed in the window using the window's color-display mode.

OpenGL Programming Guide