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

Using multisample anti-aliasing


Anti-aliasing is the technique of removing or reducing the visual impact of aliasing artifacts that are present whenever high-resolution or continuous information is presented at a lower resolution. In real-time graphics, aliasing often reveals itself in the jagged appearance of polygon edges, or the visual distortion of textures that have a high degree of variation.

The following images show an example of aliasing artifacts at the edge of an object. On the left, we can see that the edge appears jagged. This occurs because each pixel is determined to lie either completely inside the polygon or completely outside it. If the pixel is determined to be inside, it is shaded, otherwise it is not. Of course, this is not entirely accurate. Some pixels lie directly on the edge of the polygon. Some of the screen area that the pixel encompasses actually lies within the polygon and some lies outside. Better results could be achieved if we were to modify the shading of...