CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI) Forums

Hi,

I'm doing a GUI for an application with lots of semi-transparent "glass" elements. Now someone suggested that I should try to blur the background under the transparent windows, like the Aero theme for Vista does.
But I don't know where to start with this, or at which part of CEGui this could be implemented.

Do you think that it is possible? And where would you start with this?

Hi, and welcome

I think this is possible for CEGUI to do this, though it's potentially a large change. I know the scope of the changes to get such effects into CEGUI since I'm already working on a rendering system rewrite that will make this kind of thing very simple (demos of such things will be included once the support is in).

I think there is no trivial change to get this support in such that the core of CEGUI supports it, though I guess there is some potential if you were to render to a texture and go off and do your own thing with that content afterwards, though this would need you to add some direct support for rendering separate parts to texture - I think without this, the system - in it's current state - is not geared towards these kinds of effects.

So, I'm not saying it can't be done, because I'm already working on such things, hehe What I will say is that it's potentially a large and complex set of changes, and unless you're absolutely desperate, you might want to wait and see what I come up with. The only down side to that is that I can't give you an ETA (these mods are already six months overdue, though in that time the scope of the mods have been expanded considerably).

CE.

Hello,

It has been a while now since this has been requested, and I'm hoping the feature made it into CEGUI. Now, I'm trying to achieve the very same thing that was previously discussed in this thread, blurred background for glass style.
My approach is to render a material to the CEGUI window:

Now, 'material' is an Ogre::MaterialPtr ("Ogre/Compositor/GlassPass" to be more precise). The error I get on compile is : 'CEGUI::Texture &CEGUI::Renderer::createTexture(const CEGUI::Size &)' : cannot convert parameter 1 from 'Ogre::TexturePtr' to 'const CEGUI::Size &'
1> Reason: cannot convert from 'Ogre::TexturePtr' to 'const CEGUI::Size'

Now, I took the code from somewhere on the web, and I reckon it is outdated, the Renderer::createTexture method no longer takes an Ogre::TexturePtr.

Perhaps this isn't even what I need to do to get a glass like effect on a CEGUI window, and I'm understanding this all wrong.
Is rendering an Ogre material on a CEGUI window what I really need to achieve the effect?

Thanks in advance.

Ok, that was silly. How was a generic renderer interface like CEGUI::Renderer supposed to know how to create a CEGUI texture from an Ogre texture. A static_cast from Renderer to OgreRenderer was required, since this renderer knows how to deal with Ogre stuff.

Still, am I on the right path with this?

Hello again.

Unfortunately it appears I've hit a snag. I can't get the glass material to render:


textureName comes out null. Surely this must be because the Glass.material does not have a texture defined, right? It is generated by the programs. Here's the .material file:

If i do Ogre::String textureName = material->getTechnique(0)->getPass(0)->getTextureUnitState(1)->getTextureName(); instead, sure, i get the texture for WaterNormal1.tga. But the StaticImage still comes out completely white.

Any help pretty please?

Found out RenderEffect might be what I need.
Moved the discussion here, since this is more of a beginner's topic.