Capturing EAGLview content WITH alpha channel on iPhone

Question

have been struggling with this issue for quite some time now and couldn't find an answer so far. Basically, what I want to do, is capturing the content of my EAGLview and then use it to merge it with other images. Anyway, the mainproblem is, that everything transparent in my EAGLview renders opaque when saving it to the photoalbum or putting it into a UIImageView. Let me share some code with you, I found somewhere else:

- (CGImageRef) glToUIImage {
unsigned char buffer[320*480*4];
glReadPixels(0,0,320,480,GL_RGBA,GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE,&buffer);
CGDataProviderRef ref = CGDataProviderCreateWithData(NULL, &buffer, 320*480*4, NULL);
CGImageRef iref = CGImageCreate(320,480,8,32,320*4,CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB(),kCGBitmapByteOrderDefault,ref,NULL,true,kCGRenderingIntentDefault);

size_t width         = CGImageGetWidth(iref);
size_t height        = CGImageGetHeight(iref);
size_t length        = width*height*4;
uint32_t *pixels     = (uint32_t *)malloc(length);
CGContextRef context = CGBitmapContextCreate(pixels, width, height, 8, width*4, CGImageGetColorSpace(iref), kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedLast | kCGBitmapByteOrder32Big);
CGContextTranslateCTM(context, 0.0, height);
CGContextScaleCTM(context, 1.0, -1.0);
CGContextDrawImage(context, CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, width, height), iref);
CGImageRef outputRef = CGBitmapContextCreateImage(context);
UIImage *outputImage = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:outputRef];

UIImageWriteToSavedPhotosAlbum(outputImage, nil, nil, nil);
return outputRef;

}

As I already mentioned, this perfectly grabs the content of my EAGLview, but I can not get the image with its alpha values.

Any help appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Two places I can see that you might be losing your transparency:

1. when you're drawing your scene: does your scene have a transparent background? make sure you're doing a glClear to something like (0,0,0,0) rather than (0,0,0,1).
2. when you're drawing the image to flip it over: what is the default background color here? Seems likely it's a non-transparent black and you'll end up with that where the transparent parts of your scene used to be.

You could check if #2 is your problem by saving the image before you flip it over, and if it is, you could avoid the flipping over process by flipping the memory in your pixels buffer directly rather than using Core Graphics calls.