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

Tessellating a curve


In this recipe, we'll take a look at the basics of tessellation shaders by drawing a cubic Bezier curve. A Bezier curve is a parametric curve defined by four control points. The control points define the overall shape of the curve. The first and last of the four points define the start and end of the curve, and the middle points guide the shape of the curve, but do not necessarily lie directly on the curve itself. The curve is defined by interpolating the four control points using a set of blending functions. The blending functions define how much each control point contributes to the curve for a given position along the curve. For Bezier curves, the blending functions are known as the Bernstein polynomials:

In the preceding equation, the first term is the binomial coefficient function (shown in the following equation), n is the degree of the polynomial, i is the polynomial number, and t is the parametric parameter:

The general parametric form for the Bezier curve is then...