LibGDX - Getting a new Texture from a Framebufer?

I am building a cardgame where the textures for the cards need to be composed of multiple sub-parts. (the frame, the portrait, text for the damage and health values etc.).
For this I made a builder class that uses an fbo (FrameBufferObject) to draw my components to and then return the result as a Texture using: return fbo.getColorBufferTexture();

This works perfectly for a single card, but gives problems when I try to create a second card. As return fbo.getColorBufferTexture(); returns not a new Texture object but a reference to the internal Texture that the fbo draws to. So when a new card is created, all previously created cards now look the same, since all the seperate Textures are references pointing to the same place (the internal Texture of the fbo I used to create them).

How do I fix this problem?

• Is there a way to extract a new texture object from the fbo instead of a reference?
• Is there an easy way to copy data from an existing texture into a new object that I have overlooked?

Things I have tried:

• Apparently there is a way to get texturedata from a texture and the constructor for texture accepts that as input, however the code: new Texture( generatorFrameBuffer.getColorBufferTexture().getTextureData(); Does not work. (It does not give errors but when I draw the textures there is nothing to see)
• I have tried serializing the Texture using the Json class and restoring it to a new object, but this gave me an error message. This combined with the fact that the Texture class does not implement "serializable" leads me to believe this will not work.

Json only backs up primitive member variables, so it won't work on a Texture, which uses native memory (on the GPU) to store its image.

TextureData won't work, because it's referencing the same image that the Texture does. It's not making a copy.

There is no way to create multiple Textures from the same FBO. When you call getColorBufferTexture() from it, you get a Texture that always shows whatever is currently drawn onto the FrameBuffer. So even if you could create multiple of these Textures, they would all look identical.

So, if you need to be able to update these cards repeatedly during the game, then your only options are:

1. Create a separate FrameBuffer for each card.
2. Create a big FrameBuffer that you draw all your cards onto at once, and use TextureRegions to split it apart for use in the game.

If you only need to create the card once and then use it for the entire session of the game without changing its appearance, then you could use a FrameBuffer to repeatedly create images, export them as a Pixmap, and repeat. Exporting as a Pixmap copies the image data from GPU memory. You can then load the individual Pixmaps as Textures. I think this option really only makes sense if you export these Pixmaps as PNG files to load on future sessions, because it's not really saving you significant memory otherwise, and the above option is simpler to manage.

To export as Pixmap:

frameBufferToCopy.bind();
Pixmap pixmap = Pixmap.createFromFrameBuffer(0, 0, frameBufferToCopy.getWidth(), frameBufferToCopy.getHeight());