Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Second Edition

By : David Wolff, David A Wolff
Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Second Edition

By: David 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 (17 chapters)
OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Drawing a wireframe on top of a shaded mesh


The preceding recipe demonstrated the use of a geometry shader to produce a different variety of primitive than it received. Geometry shaders can also be used to provide additional information to later stages. They are quite well suited to do so because they have access to all of the vertices of the primitive at once, and can do computations based on the entire primitive rather than a single vertex.

This example involves a geometry shader that does not modify the triangle at all. It essentially passes the primitive along unchanged. However, it computes additional information about the triangle that will be used by the fragment shader to highlight the edges of the polygon. The basic idea here is to draw the edges of each polygon directly on top of the shaded mesh.

The following figure shows an example of this technique. The mesh edges are drawn on top of the shaded surface by using information computed within the geometry shader.

There are many techniques...