WebGL - reading pixel data from render buffer

Question

Is there a way to get the raw pixel data from a WebGL render buffer or frame buffer that is off screen?

I\'m using WebGL to do some image processing, e.g. blurring a

Answer 1

readPixels() should do what you want. Read more in the WebGL spec at http://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/specs/latest/

Answer 2

This is very old question, but I have looked for the same in three.js recently. There is no direct way to render to frame buffer, but actually it is done by render to texture (RTT) process. I check the framework source code and figure out the following code:

renderer.render( rttScene, rttCamera, rttTexture, true );

// ...

var width = rttTexture.width;
var height = rttTexture.height;
var pixels = new Uint8Array(4 * width * height); // be careful - allocate memory only once

// ...

var gl = renderer.context;
var framebuffer = rttTexture.__webglFramebuffer;
gl.bindFramebuffer(gl.FRAMEBUFFER, framebuffer);        
gl.viewport(0, 0, width, height);
gl.readPixels(0, 0, width, height, gl.RGBA, gl.UNSIGNED_BYTE, pixels);
gl.bindFramebuffer(gl.FRAMEBUFFER, null);

Answer 3

Yes, you can read raw pixel data. Set preserveDrawingBuffer as true while getting webgl context and afterwards make use of readPixels by WebGL.

var context = canvasElement.getContext("webgl", {preserveDrawingBuffer: true}
var pixels = new Uint8Array(4 * width * height);
context.readPixels(x, y, width, height, context.RGBA, context.UNSIGNED_BYTE, pixels)