How to work with pixels using Direct2D

Question

Could somebody provide an example of an efficient way to work with pixels using Direct2D?

For example, how can I swap all green pixels (RGB = 0x00FF00) with red pixels (RGB = 0xFF0000) on a render target? What is the standard approach? Is it possible to use ID2D1HwndRenderTarget for that? Here I assume using some kind of hardware acceleration. Should I create a different object for direct pixels manipulations?

Using DirectDraw I would use BltFast method on the IDirectDrawSurface7 with logical operation. Is there something similar with Direct2D?

Another task is to generate complex images dynamically where each point location and color is a result of a mathematical function. For the sake of an example let's simplify everything and draw Y = X ^ 2. How to do that with Direct2D? Ultimately I'm going to need to draw complex functions but if somebody could give me a simple example for Y = X ^ 2.

Answer 1

First, it helps to think of ID2D1Bitmap as a "device bitmap". It may or may not live in local, CPU-addressable memory, and it doesn't give you any convenient (or at least fast) way to read/write the pixels from the CPU side of the bus. So approaching from that angle is probably the wrong approach.

What I think you want is a regular WIC bitmap, IWICBitmap, which you can create with IWICImagingFactory::CreateBitmap(). From there you can call Lock() to get at the buffer, and then read/write using pointers and do whatever you want. Then, when you need to draw it on-screen with Direct2D, use ID2D1RenderTarget::CreateBitmap() to create a new device bitmap, or ID2D1Bitmap::CopyFromMemory() to update an existing device bitmap. You can also render into an IWICBitmap by making use of ID2D1Factory::CreateWicBitmapRenderTarget() (not hardware accelerated).

You will not get hardware acceleration for these types of operations. The updated Direct2D in Win8 (should also be available for Win7 eventually) has some spiffy stuff for this but it's rather complex looking.