Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By : Muhammad Mobeen Movania
Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By: Muhammad Mobeen Movania

Overview of this book

OpenGL is the leading cross-language, multi-platform API used by masses of modern games and applications in a vast array of different sectors. Developing graphics with OpenGL lets you harness the increasing power of GPUs and really take your visuals to the next level. OpenGL Development Cookbook is your guide to graphical programming techniques to implement 3D mesh formats and skeletal animation to learn and understand OpenGL. OpenGL Development Cookbook introduces you to the modern OpenGL. Beginning with vertex-based deformations, common mesh formats, and skeletal animation with GPU skinning, and going on to demonstrate different shader stages in the graphics pipeline. OpenGL Development Cookbook focuses on providing you with practical examples on complex topics, such as variance shadow mapping, GPU-based paths, and ray tracing. By the end you will be familiar with the latest advanced GPU-based volume rendering techniques.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
OpenGL Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Implementing screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO)


We have implemented simple lighting recipes in previous chapters. These unfortunately approximate some aspects of lighting. However, effects such as global illumination are not handled by the basic lights, as discussed earlier. In this respect, several techniques have been developed over the years which fake the global illumination effects. One such technique is Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) which we will implement in this recipe.

As the name suggests, this method works in screen space. For any given pixel onscreen, the amount of occlusion due to its neighboring pixels can be obtained by looking at the difference in their depth value. In order to reduce the sampling artefacts, the neighbor coordinates are randomly offset. For a pixel whose depth values are close to one another, they belong to the geometry which is spatially lying close. Based on the difference of the depth values, an occlusion value is determined. Given in pseudocode...