GLSL

Getting started with GLSL

So you’ve got OpenGL drawing, but now you want more control over how things look. This is where shaders come in. I’ll show you how to load them, then we’ll use them for colour, lighting, textures and bump mapping.

Start with GLSL Setup, or have a look at the tutorials below.

What we’ll cover

Vertex and fragment shaders
Lighting and textures

Code

C++ and OpenGL
GLSL shaders

Before you start

Basic OpenGL drawing
Some C++

Tutorials

First off, let’s get our shaders loading and check for errors. Once that’s working, we can start making things look a little more interesting.

• 1. GLSL Setup

  

  GLSL is the OpenGL Shader Language, and is the OpenGL version of HLSL for DirectX. It allows us to manipulate the scene on a per vertex and per fragment basis, giving us total control.

  Read tutorial →

• 2. GLSL Validation

  Validating shaders, allows us to find errors on run-time instead of the shader failing and producing corrupt output. HLSL does this upon compilation inside XNA, but we have to wait until out shader compiles, which happens ...

  Read tutorial →

• 3. GLSL Colouring

  

  Coloring in GLSL overwrites any colors you introduced into your application. But OpenGL can pass your colors to GLSL for you to use.

  Read tutorial →

• 4. GLSL Lighting

  

  GLSL also overwrites the default lighting in OpenGL, but once again, OpenGL passes all lighting information through to us in GLSL for us to use. This tutorial will teach you how to use this information to ...

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• 5. GLSL Per Pixel Lighting

  

  Previously, we looked at simuling OpenGL per vertex lighting. Now we are going to learn how to do per pixel lighting, achieving a more realistic lighting effect.

  Read tutorial →

• 6. GLSL Materials

  

  Just like lighting and coloring, OpenGL will pass us the material information for objects, allowing us to light our objects just as they would be in the fixed function OpenGL state. This tutorial will show you ...

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• 7. Texturing in GLSL

  

  GLSL also gives us the texture coordinates that we assigned in OpenGL. This means that if you pass the texture id to the shader, you can replicate all the texturing done in OpenGL.

  Read tutorial →

• 8. Bump Mapping in GLSL

  

  Bump mapping adds an extra sense of realism to today's computer graphics applications that is so simple, it just cannot be ignored. Learn how to do this in GLSL with OpenGL.

  Read tutorial →

Before you start

You should already be able to open an OpenGL window and draw a few shapes. If you haven’t got that far yet, start with the OpenGL 2 tutorials.

More tutorials

Have a look at the OpenGL 4 tutorials to use shaders with VAOs and VBOs, or try adding some lighting to a terrain scene.