Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By : Muhammad Mobeen Movania
Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By: Muhammad Mobeen Movania

Overview of this book

OpenGL is the leading cross-language, multi-platform API used by masses of modern games and applications in a vast array of different sectors. Developing graphics with OpenGL lets you harness the increasing power of GPUs and really take your visuals to the next level. OpenGL Development Cookbook is your guide to graphical programming techniques to implement 3D mesh formats and skeletal animation to learn and understand OpenGL. OpenGL Development Cookbook introduces you to the modern OpenGL. Beginning with vertex-based deformations, common mesh formats, and skeletal animation with GPU skinning, and going on to demonstrate different shader stages in the graphics pipeline. OpenGL Development Cookbook focuses on providing you with practical examples on complex topics, such as variance shadow mapping, GPU-based paths, and ray tracing. By the end you will be familiar with the latest advanced GPU-based volume rendering techniques.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
OpenGL Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Similar to how the real world would be dark without lights, we require simulated lights to see in our virtual worlds. Visual applications will be incomplete without the presence of lights. There are several kinds of lights; for example, point lights, directional lights, spot lights, and so on. Each of these have some common properties, for example, light position. In addition, they have some specific properties, such as spot direction and spot exponent for spot lights. We will cover all of these light types as well as how to implement them in the vertex shader stage or the fragment shader stage.

Although we can leave the lights to just light the environment, our visual system will start to find problems with such a setting. This is because our eyes are not used to seeing objects lit but casting no shadows. In addition, without shadows, it is very difficult to judge how near or far an object is to the other. Therefore, we detail several shadow generation techniques varying from...