Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Wolff, David A Wolff
Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Wolff, David A Wolff

Overview of this book

OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) is a programming language used for customizing parts of the OpenGL graphics pipeline that were formerly fixed-function, and are executed directly on the GPU. It provides programmers with unprecedented flexibility for implementing effects and optimizations utilizing the power of modern GPUs. With Version 4, the language has been further refined to provide programmers with greater power and flexibility, with new stages such as tessellation and compute. OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook provides easy-to-follow examples that first walk you through the theory and background behind each technique, and then go on to provide and explain the GLSL and OpenGL code needed to implement it. Beginner level through to advanced techniques are presented including topics such as texturing, screen-space techniques, lighting, shading, tessellation shaders, geometry shaders, compute shaders, and shadows. OpenGL Shading Language 4 Cookbook is a practical guide that takes you from the fundamentals of programming with modern GLSL and OpenGL, through to advanced techniques. The recipes build upon each other and take you quickly from novice to advanced level code. You'll see essential lighting and shading techniques; examples that demonstrate how to make use of textures for a wide variety of effects and as part of other techniques; examples of screen-space techniques including HDR rendering, bloom, and blur; shadowing techniques; tessellation, geometry, and compute shaders; how to use noise effectively; and animation with particle systems. OpenGL Shading Language 4 Cookbook provides examples of modern shading techniques that can be used as a starting point for programmers to expand upon to produce modern, interactive, 3D computer graphics applications.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Introduction


Tessellation and geometry shaders are relatively new additions to the OpenGL pipeline, and provide programmers with additional ways to modify geometry as it progresses through the shader pipeline. Geometry shaders can be used to add, modify, or delete geometry, and tessellation shaders can be configured to automatically generate geometry at various levels of detail and to facilitate interpolation based on arbitrary input (patches).

In this chapter, we'll look at several examples of geometry and tessellation shaders in various contexts. However, before we get into the recipes, let's investigate how all of this fits together.

The shader pipeline extended

The following diagram shows a simplified view of the shader pipeline when the shader program includes geometry and tessellation shaders:

The tessellation portion of the shader pipeline includes two stages: the tessellation control shader (TCS), and the tessellation evaluation shader (TES). The geometry shader follows the tessellation...