OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook: With over 60 recipes, this Cookbook will teach you both the elementary and finer points of the OpenGL Shading Language, and get you familiar with the specific features of GLSL 4.0. A totally practical, hands-on guide.

Shaders were first introduced into OpenGL in version 2.0, introducing programmability into the formerly fixed-function OpenGL pipeline. Shaders give us the power to implement alternative rendering algorithms and 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). The 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 by example. If you are already comfortable with GLSL, but don't have experience with version 4.0, you'll see how to implement these techniques utilizing the newer API. However...

One of the simplest shading techniques is to assume that the surface exhibits purely diffuse reflection. That is to say that the surface is one that appears to scatter light in all directions equally, regardless of direction. Incoming light strikes the surface and penetrates slightly before being re-radiated in all directions. Of course, the incoming light interacts with the surface before it is scattered, causing some wavelengths to be fully or partially absorbed and others to be scattered. A typical example of a diffuse surface is a surface that has been painted with a matte paint. The surface has a dull look with no shine at all.

The following image shows a torus rendered with diffuse shading.

The mathematical model for diffuse reflection involves two vectors: the direction from the surface point to the light source (s), and the normal vector at the surface point (n). The vectors are represented in the following diagram...

The OpenGL fixed function pipeline implemented a default shading technique which is very similar to the one presented here. It models the light-surface interaction as a combination of three components: ambient, diffuse, and specular. The ambient component is intended to model light that has been reflected so many times that it appears to be emanating uniformly from all directions. The diffuse component was discussed in the previous recipe, and represents omnidirectional reflection. The specular component models the shininess of the surface and represents reflection around a preferred direction. Combining these three components together can model a nice (but limited) variety of surface types. This shading model is also sometimes called the Phong reflection model (or Phong shading model), after Bui Tuong Phong.

An example of a torus rendered with the ADS shading model is shown in the following screenshot:

The ADS model is...

The GLSL supports functions that are syntactically similar to C functions. However, the calling conventions are somewhat different. In this example, we'll revisit the ADS shader using functions to help provide abstractions for the major steps.

When rendering a mesh that is completely closed, the back faces of polygons are hidden. However, if a mesh contains holes, it might be the case that the back faces would become visible. In this case, the polygons may be shaded incorrectly due to the fact that the normal vector is pointing in the wrong direction. To properly shade those back faces, one needs to invert the normal vector and compute the lighting equations based on the inverted normal.

The following image shows a teapot with the lid removed. On the left, the ADS lighting model is used. On the right, the ADS model is augmented with the two-sided rendering technique discussed in this recipe.

In this recipe, we'll look at an example that uses the ADS model discussed in the previous recipes, augmented with the ability to correctly shade back faces.

Per-vertex shading involves computation of the shading model at each vertex and associating the result (a color) with that vertex. The colors are then interpolated across the face of the polygon to produce a smooth shading effect. This is also referred to as Gouraud shading . In earlier versions of OpenGL, this per-vertex shading with color interpolation was the default shading technique.

It is sometimes desirable to use a single color for each polygon so that there is no variation of color across the face of the polygon, causing each polygon to have a flat appearance. This can be useful in situations where the shape of the object warrants such a technique, perhaps because the faces really are intended to look flat, or to help visualize the locations of the polygons in a complex mesh. Using a single color for each polygon is commonly called flat shading .

The images below show a mesh rendered with the ADS shading model. On the left, Gouraud shading is used. On the...

In GLSL, a subroutine is a mechanism for binding a function call to one of a set of possible function definitions based on the value of a variable. In many ways it is similar to function pointers in C. A uniform variable serves as the pointer and is used to invoke the function. The value of this variable can be set from the OpenGL side, thereby binding it to one of a few possible definitions. The subroutine's function definitions need not have the same name, but must have the same number and type of parameters and the same return type.

Subroutines therefore provide a way to select alternate implementations at runtime without swapping shader programs and/or recompiling, or using if statements along with a uniform variable. For example, a single shader could be written to provide several shading algorithms intended for use on different objects within the scene. When rendering the scene, rather than swapping shader programs (or using a conditional...

Fragment shaders can make use of the discard keyword to "throw away" fragments. Use of this keyword causes the fragment shader to stop execution, without writing anything (including depth) to the output buffer. This provides a way to create holes in polygons without using blending. In fact, since fragments are completely discarded, there is no dependence on the order in which objects are drawn, saving us the trouble of doing any depth sorting that might have been necessary if blending was used.

In this recipe, we'll draw a teapot, and use the discard keyword to remove fragments selectively based on texture coordinates. The result will look like the following image: