Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Third Edition

By : David Wolff
Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Third Edition

By: David Wolff

Overview of this book

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook, Third Edition provides easy-to-follow recipes that first walk you through the theory and background behind each technique, and then proceed to showcase and explain the GLSL and OpenGL code needed to implement them. The book begins by familiarizing you with beginner-level topics such as compiling and linking shader programs, saving and loading shader binaries (including SPIR-V), and using an OpenGL function loader library. We then proceed to cover basic lighting and shading effects. After that, you'll learn to use textures, produce shadows, and use geometry and tessellation shaders. Topics such as particle systems, screen-space ambient occlusion, deferred rendering, depth-based tessellation, and physically based rendering will help you tackle advanced topics. OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook, Third Edition also covers advanced topics such as shadow techniques (including the two of the most common techniques: shadow maps and shadow volumes). You will learn how to use noise in shaders and how to use compute shaders. The book 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)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


Shaders provide us with the ability to leverage the massive parallelism offered by modern graphics processors. Since they have the ability to transform the vertex positions, they can be used to implement animation directly within the shaders themselves. This can provide a boost in efficiency if the animation algorithm can be parallelized appropriately for execution within the shader.

If a shader is to help with animation, it must not only compute the positions, but often it must write out the updated positions for use in the next frame. Shaders were not originally designed to write to arbitrary buffers (except, of course, the framebuffer). However, with recent versions, OpenGL has provided the ability to do so via a number of techniques including shader storage buffer objects and image load/store. As of OpenGL 3.0, we can also send the values of the vertex or geometry shader's output variables to an arbitrary buffer (or buffers). This feature is called transform feedback, and...