Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Third Edition

By : David Wolff
Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Third Edition

By: David Wolff

Overview of this book

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook, Third Edition provides easy-to-follow recipes that first walk you through the theory and background behind each technique, and then proceed to showcase and explain the GLSL and OpenGL code needed to implement them. The book begins by familiarizing you with beginner-level topics such as compiling and linking shader programs, saving and loading shader binaries (including SPIR-V), and using an OpenGL function loader library. We then proceed to cover basic lighting and shading effects. After that, you'll learn to use textures, produce shadows, and use geometry and tessellation shaders. Topics such as particle systems, screen-space ambient occlusion, deferred rendering, depth-based tessellation, and physically based rendering will help you tackle advanced topics. OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook, Third Edition also covers advanced topics such as shadow techniques (including the two of the most common techniques: shadow maps and shadow volumes). You will learn how to use noise in shaders and how to use compute shaders. The book 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)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Creating a particle fountain


In computer graphics, a particle system is a group of objects that are used to simulate a variety of fuzzy systems such as smoke, liquid spray, fire, explosions, or other similar phenomena. Each particle is considered to be a point object with a position, but no size. They could be rendered as point sprites (using the GL_POINTS primitive mode), or as camera aligned quads or triangles. Each particle has a lifetime: it is born, animates according to a set of rules, and then dies. The particle can then be resurrected and go through the entire process again. In this example, particles do not interact with other particles, but some systems, such as fluid simulations, would require a particle to interact. A common technique is to render the particle as a single, textured, camera-facing quad with transparency.

During the lifetime of a particle, it is animated according to a set of rules. These rules include the basic kinematic equations that define the movement of a...