I want to make portals with threejs by drawing an ellipse and then texture mapping a WebGlRenderTarget to its face. I have that function sort of working, but it tries to stretch the large rectangular buffer from the render target to the ellipse. What I want is to project the texture in its original dimensions onto the ellipse and just cut out anything that doesn't hit the ellipse like so:
Before Projection:
After projection:
How can this be done with threejs? I've looked into texture coordinates, but don't understand how to use them, and even saw a projection light PR in threejs that might work?
Edit: I also watched a Sebastian Lague video on portals and saw he does this with “screen space coordinates”. Any advice on using those?
Thanks for your help!
Made a codepen available here:
https://codepen.io/cdeep/pen/JjyjOqY
UV mapping lets us specify which parts of the texture correspond to which vertices of the geometry. More details here: https://www.spiria.com/en/blog/desktop-software/understanding-uv-mapping-and-textures/
You could loop through the vertices and set the corresponding UV value.
const vertices = ellipseGeometry.attributes.position.array;
for(let i = 0; i < numPoints; i++) {
const [x, y] = [vertices[3*i], vertices[3*i + 1]];
uvPositions.push(0.5 + x * imageHeight / ((2 * yRadius) * imageWidth));
uvPositions.push(0.5 + y / (2 * yRadius));
}
ellipseGeometry.setAttribute("uv", new THREE.Float32BufferAttribute(uvPositions, 2 ));
UV coordinates increase from (0, 0) to (1, 1) from bottom left to top right. The above code works because the ellipse is on the x-y plane. Or else, you'll need to get the x,y values in the plane of the ellipse.
More info on texture mapping in three.js here:
https://discoverthreejs.com/book/first-steps/textures-intro/
Edit: Do note that the demo doesn't really look like a portal. For that, you'll need to move the texture based on the camera view which isn't that simple