How can I perform clipping on rotated rectangles?

Question

So I have this Panel class. It's a little like a Window where you can resize, close, add buttons, sliders, etc. Much like the status screen in Morrowind if any of you remember. The behavior I want is that when a sprite is outside of the panel's bounds it doesn't get drawn and if it's partially outside only the part inside gets drawn. So what it does right now is first get a rectangle that represents the bounds of the panel, and a rectangle for the sprite, it finds the rectangle of intersection between the two then translates that intersection to the local coordinates of the sprite rectangle and uses that for the source rectangle. It works and as clever as I feel the code is I can't shake the feeling that there's a better way to do this. Also, with this set up I cannot utilize a global transformation matrix for my 2D camera, everything in the "world" must be passed a camera argument to draw. Anyway, here's the code I have:
for the Intersection:

     public static Rectangle? Intersection(Rectangle rectangle1, Rectangle rectangle2)
     {
        if (rectangle1.Intersects(rectangle2))
        {
            if (rectangle1.Contains(rectangle2))
            {
                return rectangle2;
            }
            else if (rectangle2.Contains(rectangle1))
            {
                return rectangle1;
            }
            else
            {
                int x = Math.Max(rectangle1.Left, rectangle2.Left);
                int y = Math.Max(rectangle1.Top, rectangle2.Top);
                int height = Math.Min(rectangle1.Bottom, rectangle2.Bottom) - Math.Max(rectangle1.Top, rectangle2.Top);
                int width = Math.Min(rectangle1.Right, rectangle2.Right) - Math.Max(rectangle1.Left, rectangle2.Left);
                return new Rectangle(x, y, width, height);
            }
        }
        else
        {
            return null;
        }
     }

and for actually drawing on the panel:

    public void DrawOnPanel(IDraw sprite, SpriteBatch spriteBatch)
    {
        Rectangle panelRectangle = new Rectangle(
           (int)_position.X,
           (int)_position.Y,
           _width,
           _height);
        Rectangle drawRectangle = new Rectangle();

        drawRectangle.X = (int)sprite.Position.X;
        drawRectangle.Y = (int)sprite.Position.Y;
        drawRectangle.Width = sprite.Width;
        drawRectangle.Height = sprite.Height;

        if (panelRectangle.Contains(drawRectangle))
        {
            sprite.Draw(
                spriteBatch,
                drawRectangle,
                null);
        }
        else if (Intersection(panelRectangle, drawRectangle) == null)
        {
            return;
        }
        else if (Intersection(panelRectangle, drawRectangle).HasValue)
        {
            Rectangle intersection = Intersection(panelRectangle, drawRectangle).Value;

            if (Intersection(panelRectangle, drawRectangle) == drawRectangle)
            {
                sprite.Draw(spriteBatch, intersection, intersection);
            }
            else
            {
                sprite.Draw(
                    spriteBatch,
                    intersection,
                    new Rectangle(
                        intersection.X - drawRectangle.X,
                        intersection.Y - drawRectangle.Y,
                        intersection.Width,
                        intersection.Height));
            }
        }
    }

So I guess my question is, is there a better way to do this?

Update: Just found out about the ScissorRectangle property. This seems like a decent way to do this; it requires a RasterizerState object to be made and passed into the spritebatch.Begin overload that accepts it. Seems like this might be the best bet though. There's also the Viewport which I can apparently change around. Thoughts? :)

Answer 1

There are several ways to limit drawing to a portion of the screen. If the area is rectangular (which seems to be the case here), you could set the viewport (see GraphicsDevice) to the panel's surface.

For non-rectangular areas, you can use the stencil buffer or use some tricks with the depth buffer. Draw the shape of the surface in the stencil buffer or the depth buffer, set your render state to draw only pixels located in the shape you just rendered in the stencil/depth buffer, finally render your sprites.