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

Simulating fog


A simple fog effect can be achieved by mixing the color of each fragment with a constant fog color. The amount of influence of the fog color is determined by the distance from the camera. We could use either a linear relationship between the distance and the amount of fog color, or we could use a non-linear relationship such as an exponential one.

The following image shows four teapots rendered with a fog effect produced by mixing the fog color in a linear relationship with distance:

To define this linear relationship, we can use the following equation:

In the preceding equation, dmin is the distance from the eye where the fog is minimal (no fog contribution), and dmax is the distance where the fog color obscures all other colors in the scene. The variable z represents the distance from the eye. The value f is the fog factor. A fog factor of zero represents 100% fog, and a factor of one represents no fog. Since fog typically looks thickest at longer distances, the fog factor...