Book Image

OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook

Book Image

OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook

Overview of this book

The 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 4.0, the language has been further refined to provide programmers with greater flexibility, and additional features have been added such as an entirely new stage called the tessellation shader. The OpenGL Shading Language 4.0 Cookbook provides easy-to-follow examples that first walk you through the theory and background behind each technique then go on to provide and explain the GLSL and OpenGL code needed to implement it. Beginning level through to advanced techniques are presented including topics such as texturing, screen-space techniques, lighting, shading, tessellation shaders, geometry shaders, and shadows. The OpenGL Shading Language 4.0 Cookbook is a practical guide that takes you from the basics of programming with GLSL 4.0 and OpenGL 4.0, through basic lighting and shading techniques, to more advanced techniques and effects. It presents techniques for producing basic lighting and shading effects; 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, shadowing, tessellation and geometry shaders, noise, and animation. The OpenGL Shading Language 4.0 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 (16 chapters)
OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Textures are an important and fundamental aspect of real-time rendering in general, and OpenGL in particular. The use of textures within a shader opens up a huge range of possibilities. Beyond just using textures as sources of color information, they can be used for things like additional sources of data (such as depth information), shading parameters, displacement maps, normal vectors, or other vertex data. The list is virtually endless. Textures are among the most widely used tool for advanced effects in OpenGL programs, and that isn't likely to change anytime soon.

Note

In fact, the term "texture" as it is used in OpenGL 4.0 could be considered as somewhat of a misnomer. Textures are used for many different purposes beyond just the storage of image data, and might be more accurately described as just an arbitrary chunk of memory.

In this chapter, we'll look at some basic and advanced texturing techniques. We'll start with the basics, just applying color textures, and move on...