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

Creating a disintegration effect


It is straightforward to use the GLSL discard keyword in combination with noise to simulate erosion or decay. We can simply discard fragments that correspond to a noise value that is above or below a certain threshold. The following image shows a teapot with this effect. Fragments are discarded when the noise value corresponding to the texture coordinate is outside a certain threshold range.

Getting ready

Set up your OpenGL program to provide position, normal, and texture coordinates to the shader. Be sure to pass the texture coordinate along to the fragment shader. Set up any uniforms needed to implement the shading model of your choice.

Create a seamless noise texture (see Creating a seamless noise texture), and place it in the appropriate texture channel.

The following uniforms are defined in the fragment shader, and should be set via the OpenGL program:

  • NoiseTex: The noise texture.

  • LowThreshold: Fragments are discarded if the noise value is below this value...