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

Applying a 2D texture


In GLSL, applying a texture to a surface involves accessing texture memory to retrieve a color associated with a texture coordinate, and then applying that color to the output fragment. The application of the color to the output fragment could involve mixing the color with the color produced by a shading model, simply applying the color directly, using the color in the reflection model, or some other mixing process. In GLSL, textures are accessed via sampler variables. A sampler variable is a "handle" to a texture unit. It is typically declared as a uniform variable within the shader and initialized within the main OpenGL application to point to the appropriate texture unit.

In this recipe, we'll look at a simple example involving the application of a 2D texture to a surface as shown in the following image. We'll use the texture color to scale the color provided by the Phong (ADS) reflection model. The following image shows the results of a brick texture applied to a...