Drawing into the depth buffer

General Discussion
1

I’ve got a 2d image and a matching 2d depth map. What I want to do is draw these into the frame and depth buffers, so that when I render 3d models they are draw in front/behind the respective areas of the 2d image … faking 3d.

In raw OpenGL I should be able to achieve this through use of glDrawPixels; but how do I do it in Panda3d?

I suspect theres a solution using shaders (I’ve no idea how) but it really feels like that would be overcomplicating the problem; all I want to do is sidestep the whole rendering from 3d to 2d bit and just supply the data directly.

Thoughts?

2

shaders fragment shaders can draw to the depth buffer just like they do to the color buffer, nothing special really. Just output “float o_Depth : DEPTH” from your fragment shader.