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

Introduction


Shaders were first added into OpenGL in version 2.0, introducing programmability into the formerly fixed-function OpenGL pipeline. Shaders give us the power to implement custom rendering algorithms and provide us with a greater degree of flexibility in the implementation of those techniques. With shaders, we can run custom code directly on the GPU, providing us with the opportunity to leverage the high degree of parallelism available with modern GPUs.

Shaders are implemented using the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL). GLSL is syntactically similar to C, which should make it easier for experienced OpenGL programmers to learn. Due to the nature of this text, I won't present a thorough introduction to GLSL here. Instead, if you're new to GLSL, reading through these recipes should help you to learn the language through example. If you are already comfortable with GLSL, but don't have experience with version 4.x, you'll see how to implement these techniques by utilizing the newer API...