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Is it possible to render into a texture atlas?

I've been wondering how to reduce the number of textures required for shadow-mapping, and came across a blog post here about rendering up to sixteen shadow maps into one texture-atlas.

According to the blog post mentioned above, these are the steps required:

1. The first step is writing to the texture; bind it to the framebuffer and set the viewport to render into the texture sub-region.

2. When accessing the sub-region, scale/bias the texture coordinates as follows: scale = region size / texture size, bias = region offset / texture size.

I understand this, but I'm not sure how to alter the viewport specifically to allow me to render into a certain square of the texture. I've found plenty of information about reading from it (up-sampling and down-sampling) but I don't know how I'd manipulate the viewport specifically to render into a small square region of the screen, and how I'd do this with a texture smaller than the back-buffer.

I'm using XNA and HLSL at the moment because it's simpler than SharpDX, and there's no point in messing around with that until I've got the theory working 100%.

Thanks for your help.

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Set the GraphicsDevice.Viewport property to a new Viewport struct with the values you want. Set X and Y offset, set Width and Height. All these values are in units of pixels, so the size of the target texture doesn't matter.

Here is a simple code example. It uses separate cameras to accomplish different perspectives per viewport, but you don't need that portion. You only need the lines that assign different Viewports.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks. I was confused and thought it was something else entirely. Whoops. :S \$\endgroup\$ Commented Feb 16, 2014 at 22:35

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