Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Second Edition

By : David Wolff, David A Wolff
Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Second Edition

By: David Wolff, David A Wolff

Overview of this book

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, the language has been further refined to provide programmers with greater power and flexibility, with new stages such as tessellation and compute. OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook provides easy-to-follow examples that first walk you through the theory and background behind each technique, and then go on to provide and explain the GLSL and OpenGL code needed to implement it. Beginner level through to advanced techniques are presented including topics such as texturing, screen-space techniques, lighting, shading, tessellation shaders, geometry shaders, compute shaders, and shadows. OpenGL Shading Language 4 Cookbook is a practical guide that takes you from the fundamentals of programming with modern GLSL and OpenGL, through to advanced techniques. The recipes build upon each other and take you quickly from novice to advanced level code. You'll see essential lighting and shading techniques; 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 including HDR rendering, bloom, and blur; shadowing techniques; tessellation, geometry, and compute shaders; how to use noise effectively; and animation with particle systems. OpenGL Shading Language 4 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 (17 chapters)
OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Tessellating a 2D quad


One of the best ways to understand OpenGL's hardware tessellation is to visualize the tessellation of a 2D quad. When linear interpolation is used, the triangles that are produced are directly related to the tessellation coordinates (u,v) that are produced by the tessellation primitive generator. It can be extremely helpful to draw a few quads with different inner and outer tessellation levels, and study the triangles produced. We will do exactly that in this recipe.

When using quad tessellation, the tessellation primitive generator subdivides (u,v) parameter space into a number of subdivisions based on six parameters. These are the inner tessellation levels for u and v (inner level 0 and inner level 1), and the outer tessellation levels for u and v along both edges (outer levels 0 to 3). These determine the number of subdivisions along the edges of parameter space and internally. Let's look at each of these individually:

  • Outer level 0 (OL0): This is the number of subdivisions...