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


Shadows add a great deal of realism to a scene. Without shadows, it can be easy to misjudge the relative location of objects, and the lighting can appear unrealistic, as light rays seem to pass right through objects.

Shadows are important visual cues for realistic scenes, but can be challenging to produce in an efficient manner in interactive applications. One of the most popular techniques for creating shadows in real-time graphics is the shadow mapping algorithm (also called depth shadows). In this chapter, we'll look at several recipes surrounding the shadow mapping algorithm. We'll start with the basic algorithm, and discuss it in detail in the first recipe. Then we'll look at a couple of techniques for improving the look of the shadows produced by the basic algorithm.

We'll finish up the chapter with a look at ambient occlusion (AO). Ambient occlusion is a technique that takes into account light attenuation due to occlusion. In other words, with AO, the parts of the scene...