Part 4 – Essential Rendering Techniques

This part covers the visual representation of 3D objects and introduces vertex and fragment shaders. Through the use of shaders, you will discover how to optimize and speed up graphics rendering by employing the power of the graphics processing unit. The contents will cover the practical conversion of the OpenGL program written throughout to use shader code. In addition, shading models for lighting will be applied before the book wraps up by implementing the latest shader technique of physically-based rendering.

In this part, we cover the following chapters:

• Chapter 17, Vertex and Fragment Shading
• Chapter 18, Customizing the Render Pipeline
• Chapter 19, Rendering Visual Realism Like a Pro