linebender / linebender/vello

Feature request: offset/region support in RenderParams for atlas-style rendering

Open
#1,789 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
4.3k
Forks
300
Avg merge
2d 13h
Merged PRs (30d)
61

Description

Use case

I'm building a UI system where individual nodes are cached as rasterized
regions in a shared texture atlas (for performance reasons — avoiding
recomputation of unchanged nodes across frames). The atlas is a single
persistent wgpu::Texture, and I need to update individual regions
without affecting the rest of the atlas.

Currently, Renderer::render_to_texture always clears and rasterizes
the full width×height area specified in RenderParams, with no way
to target an offset sub-region of a larger texture. This means I have
to render each node into a separate small "scratch" texture at the
origin, then use copy_texture_to_texture to composite it into the
atlas at the correct position — an extra render+copy step per updated
node, instead of a single direct render into the target region.

What I'd like

Some way to render a scene into a sub-region of a texture — e.g. an
offset: (u32, u32) field on RenderParams, or an equivalent method
that lets the coarse rasterization stage target a region rather than
always starting at (0,0).

Prior art in this repo

I noticed vello_hybrid already added render_to_atlas and
write_to_atlas APIs for glyph caching (mentioned in the v0.0.7
changelog, PR #1458). Would it be reasonable to bring an equivalent
capability to the main vello crate, or is there a reason this is
scoped to vello_hybrid specifically (e.g. related to its
CPU-preprocessing architecture vs. the pure compute-shader pipeline)?

Happy to provide more context on the atlas-caching use case if useful.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the Renderer::render_to_texture entry point and RenderParams, then compare vello_hybrid's render_to_atlas and write_to_atlas APIs and PR #1458. Determine whether main vello can target an offset region without the scratch-texture copy step, and define how completion would be validated for atlas rendering.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
computer-graphics, performance
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
38/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.