Book Image

OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook

Book Image

OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook

Overview of this book

The 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 4.0, the language has been further refined to provide programmers with greater flexibility, and additional features have been added such as an entirely new stage called the tessellation shader. The OpenGL Shading Language 4.0 Cookbook provides easy-to-follow examples that first walk you through the theory and background behind each technique then go on to provide and explain the GLSL and OpenGL code needed to implement it. Beginning level through to advanced techniques are presented including topics such as texturing, screen-space techniques, lighting, shading, tessellation shaders, geometry shaders, and shadows. The OpenGL Shading Language 4.0 Cookbook is a practical guide that takes you from the basics of programming with GLSL 4.0 and OpenGL 4.0, through basic lighting and shading techniques, to more advanced techniques and effects. It presents techniques for producing basic lighting and shading effects; 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, shadowing, tessellation and geometry shaders, noise, and animation. The OpenGL Shading Language 4.0 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 (16 chapters)
OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Shading with multiple positional lights


When shading with multiple light sources, we need to evaluate the shading equation for each light and sum the results to determine the total light intensity reflected by a surface location. The natural choice is to create uniform arrays to store the position and intensity of each light. We'll use an array of structures so that we can store the values for multiple lights within a single uniform variable.

The following image shows a "pig" mesh rendered with 5 light sources of different colors. Note the multiple specular highlights.

Getting ready

Set up your OpenGL program with the vertex position in attribute location zero, and the normal in location one.

How to do it...

To create a shader program that renders using the ADS (Phong) shading model with multiple light sources, use the following steps:

  1. Use the following vertex shader:

    #version 400
    
    layout (location = 0) in vec3 VertexPosition;
    layout (location = 1) in vec3 VertexNormal;
    
    out vec3 Color;
    
    struct...