David Wolff - OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook

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First published: July 2011

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Third edition: September 2018

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David Wolff is a professor in the computer science department at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU). He received a PhD in Physics and an MS in computer science from Oregon State University. He has been teaching computer graphics to undergraduates at PLU for over 17 years, using OpenGL.

Dr. Muhammad Mobeen Movania received his PhD degree in Advance Computer Graphics and Visualization from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. After his graduation, he joined the Institute for Infocomm Research, A-Star Singapore as a research scientist.

Dr. Movania has published several international conference and journal papers in the area of computer graphics and visualization. He has written two books on OpenGL namely, OpenGL Development Cookbook and OpenGL Build High Performance Graphics . He has also contributed book chapters in OpenGL Insights, WebGL Insights, and Game Engine Gems 3. He is associated with DHA Suffa University since 2013 and is currently serving as the Head of Computer Science Department. His GitHub ID is mmmovania.

Johannes Unterguggenberger is a University Assistant at TU Wien's Rendering and Modeling Group, Institute of Visual Computing and Human-Centered Technology. He is training students to become skilled graphics developers, which includes gaining expertise in OpenGL and GLSL. He always orients towards the future, be it by refusing to use any C++ version older than 17, developing Augmented Reality rendering techniques and frameworks, or exploring the limits of new graphics hardware.

After working in various fields across the IT industry, he is now fully devoted to education
and research, having set his sights on achieving greater visual gloriousness in future games
and other real-time applications. Furthermore, he really likes good CG-books and
congratulates you for picking one of them up.

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The OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) is now a fundamental and critical part of programming with OpenGL. It provides us with unprecedented flexibility and power by making the formerly fixed-function graphics pipeline programmable. With GLSL, we can leverage the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to implement advanced and sophisticated rendering techniques and even do arbitrary computation. With GLSL 4.x, programmers can do more with the GPU than ever before thanks to shader stages such as tessellation shaders and compute shaders.

In this book, we cover the full spectrum of GLSL programming. Starting with the basics of shading with the vertex and fragment shaders, we take you from simple to advanced techniques. From textures, shadows, and image processing, to noise and particle systems, we cover practical examples to give you the tools you need to leverage GLSL in your projects. We also cover how to use geometry shaders, tessellation shaders, and the recent addition to GLSL: compute shaders. With these, you can make use of the GPU for a variety of tasks that go beyond just shading. With geometry and tessellation shaders, we can create additional geometry or modify geometry, and with compute shaders we can do arbitrary computation on the GPU.