I have a software that performs volume rendering through a raycasting approach. The actual raycasting shader writes the raycasted volume depth into a framebuffer object, through gl_FragDepth, that I bind before calling the shader.

The problem I have is that I would like to use this depth in another shader that I call later on. I figured out that the only way to do that is to bind the framebuffer once the raycasting has finished, read the depthmap through something like glReadPixels(0, 0, m_winSize.x , m_winSize.y, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_FLOAT, pixels); and write it to a 2D texture as usual glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT24, m_winSize.x, m_winSize.y, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_FLOAT, pixels) and then pass this 2D texture that contains a simple depth map to the other shader.

However, I am not entirely sure that what I do is the proper way to do this. Is there anyway to pass the framebuffer that I fill up in my raycasting shader to the other shader?