[Imstk-developers] Text Rendering

[Milef, Nicholas Boris]

One thing we may want to look into is optimizing text rendering. I think VTK uses FreeType, but that method has historically been slow for high-performance real-time applications because you essentially have to render out each character at a certain resolution (which is bad for 3D text especially since the render size would need to change with distance).

Valve published an influential paper here that works well in 2D and 3D:
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/SIGGRAPH2007_AlphaTestedMagnification.pdf

Also, there's some interesting discussion in this answer here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5262951/what-is-state-of-the-art-for-text-rendering-in-opengl-as-of-version-4-1

What's interesting is that one approach is to model text essentially as a mesh and use geometry shaders to create planes out of the vertices to map the textures on them. IDK how great that approach is though because geometry shaders don't tolerate generating geometry very well, but it's an option. Otherwise, instancing should work well enough.
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