Hi, I’m trying to do some special effects by rendering a few things in a color buffer, and then draw other things on a new color buffer but using the original depth buffer from the first render. Is it possible to do this?

You could save the depth information in a texture and then reuse it for an arbitrary amount of effects. Many post-processing effects work like that. The following example illustrates this approach by visualizing the depth of the original scene. https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_depth_texture

Yeah I came across that…but I’m trying to make this as efficient as possible, and if I use that texture I would have to sample it and make an explicit discard operation comparing to the current depth value instead of taking advantage of the early ztest. Thanks for your time anyway :slight_smile: ED…

Yes it is possible using the EXT_frag_depth extension you can write values to the depth buffer in the fragmentshader in gl_FragDepthEXT. ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EXT_frag_depth )

Hi, i was able to achieve this by calling _gl.framebufferRenderbuffer( _gl.FRAMEBUFFER, _gl.DEPTH_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT, _gl.RENDERBUFFER, renderbuffer ); and was able to use the same stencil to draw into two different targets. It’s really neat! But i can’t make it work with three.js. Has anyone been…

Reusing depth buffer of a RenderTarget

Questions

DolphinIQ April 25, 2022, 3:06pm 6

In case anyone finds this topic, it seems it has been solved in Apply depth buffer from render target to the next render

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Apply depth buffer from render target to the next render Questions render-target , depth-texture , framebuffer	3	3775	April 21, 2022
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Is it possible to render depth buffer with WebGLMultipleRenderTargets? Questions render-target , depth-texture , rtt , mrt	1	1085	February 9, 2022
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Reusing depth buffer of a RenderTarget

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