Re: Adding normal matrix to CSS Shaders

On Dec 16, 2011, at 10:51 PM, Fabrice Robinet wrote:

> Hi group,
> 
> One great outcome of CSS Shader could be the ability to add custom/simple lighting to DOM elements.
> The simple addition of the normal matrix to be passed to the shader (as optional),
> would allow simple cases without impacting the SPEC too much.

This brings up a question I have about matrices and the shaders. The shader doesn't get a model-view matrix, so what would the normal matrix be? The only matrix passed in is the projection matrix and I'm not sure what value it has. Does it include some perspective value or is it just a mapping between NDC and the pixel space in which the element is rendered? 

I like the idea of making it possible to do lighting in CSS shaders. But to do that we'd need to pass in a model-view matrix, which would probably be the cumulative transform property from the element to the root, not including perspective, and add the perspective property to the projection matrix. Add a normal matrix to that and you can do complete lighting calculations. These would all be based on a viewer looking down at the page.

But it's slightly more complicated than that. A web page can have multiple CSS perspective properties. But when an element has perspective, you can think of it as the viewing frustum for all its children. So I think we can safely make the model-view matrix the cumulative transform from that perspective element to the element with the CSS shader.

All of these matrices have a cost associated with them. So if we want to make the complete set available, we might want to make it opt in, so we're not computing them unnecessarily.

Does this make sense?

Received on Monday, 19 December 2011 22:12:43 UTC