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GLSL Essentials

You're reading from   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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Product type Paperback
Published in Dec 2013
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781849698009
Length 116 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Jacobo Rodriguez Jacobo Rodriguez
Author Profile Icon Jacobo Rodriguez
Jacobo Rodriguez
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Toc

Drawing a simple geometry sample


In order to have a runnable shader program, we need a vertex shader and a fragment shader. Until now, we have not spoken about fragment shaders, but we still need one to run the samples, so I'll present here a simple fragment shader to use in conjunction with the next vertex shaders. This will be our sample fragment shader, kept as simple as possible for learning purposes:

// Fragment shader
#version 430
#pragma debug(on)
#pragma optimize(off)

uniform vec4 SolidColor;

// Writing to this variable will set the current fragment's color
out vec4 frameBufferColor; 

void main()
{
  frameBufferColor = SolidColor;
}

This fragment shader paints the whole triangle surface with a solid color, provided by means of a uniform variable (fragment shaders also have uniform variables).

Coming back to the vertex shaders, let's start with a simple one. The simplest thing we could want to do is show our geometry as it is, on the screen, rendered with a single solid color. So...

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