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


It's easy to use shaders to create a smooth-looking surface, but that is not always the desired goal. If we want to create realistic-looking objects, we need to simulate the imperfections of real surfaces. That includes things such as scratches, rust, dents, and erosion. It is somewhat surprising how challenging it can be to make surfaces look like they have really been subjected to these natural processes. Similarly, we sometimes want to represent natural surfaces such as wood grain or natural phenomena such as clouds to be as realistic as possible without giving the impression of them being synthetic or exhibiting a repetitive pattern or structure.

Most effects or patterns in nature exhibit a certain degree of randomness and non-linearity. Therefore, you might imagine that we could generate them by simply using random data. However, random data such as the kind that is generated from a pseudo-random number generator is not very useful in computer graphics. There are two main...