GLSL Essentials: If you're involved in graphics programming, you need to know about shaders, and this is the book to do it. A hands-on guide to the OpenGL Shading Language, it walks you through the absolute basics to advanced techniques.

Jacobo Rodriguez

€18.99 per month

2 (3 Ratings)

Paperback Dec 2013 116 pages 1st Edition

Jacobo Rodriguez

€18.99 per month

2 (3 Ratings)

Paperback Dec 2013 116 pages 1st Edition

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Key benefits

Learn about shaders in a step-by-step, interactive manner
Create stunning visual effects using vertex and fragment shaders
Simplify your CPU code and improve your overall performance with instanced drawing through the use of geometry shaders

Description

Shader programming has been the largest revolution in graphics programming. OpenGL Shading Language (abbreviated: GLSL or GLslang), is a high-level shading language based on the syntax of the C programming language.With GLSL you can execute code on your GPU (aka graphics card). More sophisticated effects can be achieved with this technique.Therefore, knowing how OpenGL works and how each shader type interacts with each other, as well as how they are integrated into the system, is imperative for graphic programmers. This knowledge is crucial in order to be familiar with the mechanisms for rendering 3D objects. GLSL Essentials is the only book on the market that teaches you about shaders from the very beginning. It shows you how graphics programming has evolved, in order to understand why you need each stage in the Graphics Rendering Pipeline, and how to manage it in a simple but concise way. This book explains how shaders work in a step-by-step manner, with an explanation of how they interact with the application assets at each stage. This book will take you through the graphics pipeline and will describe each section in an interactive and clear way. You will learn how the OpenGL state machine works and all its relevant stages. Vertex shaders, fragment shaders, and geometry shaders will be covered, as well some use cases and an introduction to the math needed for lighting algorithms or transforms. Generic GPU programming (GPGPU) will also be covered. After reading GLSL Essentials you will be ready to generate any rendering effect you need.

Who is this book for?

If you want upgrade your skills, or are new to shader programming and want to learn about graphic programming, this book is for you. If you want a clearer idea of shader programming, or simply want to upgrade from fixed pipeline systems to state-of-the-art shader programming and are familiar with any C-based language, then this book will show you what you need to know.

What you will learn

Use vertex shaders to dynamically displace or deform a mesh on the fly
Colorize your pixels unleashing the power of fragment shaders
Learn the basics of the Phong Illumination model to add emphasis to your scenes
Combine textures to make your scene more realistic
Save CPU and GPU cycles by performing instanced drawing
Save bandwidth by generating geometry on the fly
Learn about GPU Generic programming concepts
Convert algorithms from CPU to GPU to increase performance

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Frequently bought together

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Total € 116.97

Michael Dwan Feb 23, 2014

GLSL Essentials is a small, but dense, book on OpenGL Shading Language 4.3. The book itself is divided quite logically with the first chapter unremarkably offering an obligatory introduction to the rendering pipeline.Chapter 2 is where you first begin to find some value in this small book. Here, you will be introduced to GLSL 4.30, of course, were it not for the many evolutions of GLSL over the years this chapter would be mostly unnecessary, however, it is nice to have as a reference if you're coming from older versions of GLSL. In general, it would have been nice to have annotation for constructs indicating in what version of GLSL they were introduced, but otherwise, this is a fine reference.Chapters 3 and 4 cover vertex and fragment shaders, and for the most part these stages have not changed drastically since earlier versions of GLSL, GLSL Essentials does an admirable job of introducing these two shader stages without assuming prior experience using GLSL, I expect this to be a welcome prelude for those newer to OpenGL and GLSL.Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 which cover geometry and compute shaders, respectively, were the most interesting sections, in my opinion. Although like chapters 3 and 4, the coverage is quick and high level they both do a good job of introducing the key benefits of these shader stages which, to a beginner especially, is not necessarily clear just reading GLSL documentation. After reading these chapters you will have enough insight to understand some of the possibilities these stages expose and that is valuable.All the shader stage chapters are punctuated nicely with example code illustrating the discussion, however, the examples are generally quite simple, and the discussions are, for the most part, elementary. This is not meant to slight the content of the book, it lives up to its claims, in that it covers the essential topics in just enough detail to get you started, but its definitely geared to the uninitiated.Some of the example code is poorly written/edited. For instance, there is, inexplicably, several loops iterating with floating point counters, and then worse, the floating point value is used to index an array. I can’t imagine the reasoning here, but it speaks poorly of the text, which otherwise is not bad.Overall I can recommend the book as an introduction to the topic, provided you have the hardware necessary to run the code you are writing. Those hoping for a more in depth exploration of GLSL would definitely do well to look elsewhere. The book does lose points for being poorly edited and also for the exclusion of tessellation shaders, an exclusion for which the author offers no explanation.

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TauriRed Aug 28, 2017

I was hoping for much when I opened book with such title. This is very small descriptions of existing shader types and that's all.No Why's or If's on shaders.

DC Bateman Feb 12, 2014

I was looking forward to this book, the chapter headings looked promising and with a low page count (about 90) I was expecting a concise introduction to GLSL. Any hopes were short lived, however.Apart from the chapter headings this is a confused mess of book. Written and, worse, poorly edited by non-native English speakers, with confusing, distracting, incorrect grammar which makes the already poor descriptions even more confusing and difficult to follow.Chapter headings aside, there is no clear progression and important steps/points are missed in both explanations and code samples. Key concepts -- fixed and programmable pipelines, their relationship to each other, and the flow of data through the programmable pipeline -- are poorly described.The code samples are incomplete:for instance no values are given for the projection and model-view matrices -- "fill with proper values" is the sum total of the information given to aid the reader.Apart from a dozen or so lines of C, the code samples are all GLSL. I was unable to find any source code online so it appears that the reader is expected to write the host code themselves.Some specific shortcomings:* "floats" are used in "for" loops, apart from being an unnecessary waste of GPU space they can lead to off-by-one errors.* The description of matrices as an array of vectors is out-and-out wrong.GLSL Essentials might have been a good book, all the necessary parts are there, but they are confusingly realized, so this book is sorely lacking as an introduction. While some basic concepts are over-explained (e.g. comments) others are simply taken for granted (e.g. variable location) and left unexplained.While it aims to cover the essentials, it does so very poorly and with the basic mistakes it makes it is difficult to trust anything in this book (I was constantly referring to the internet to confirm what I read).A very poor book and most definitely not essential.

GLSL Essentials: If you're involved in graphics programming, you need to know about shaders, and this is the book to do it. A hands-on guide to the OpenGL Shading Language, it walks you through the absolute basics to advanced techniques.

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GLSL Essentials

Chapter 2. GLSL Basics

The Language

Language basics

Instructions

Basic types...

Shader input and output variables

Uniform variables

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GLSL Essentials: If you're involved in graphics programming, you need to know about shaders, and this is the book to do it. A hands-on guide to the OpenGL Shading Language, it walks you through the absolute basics to advanced techniques.

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What you will learn

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What do you get with a Packt Subscription?

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