11.5. Summary

A master magician can make it look like something is created out of thin air. With procedural textures, you, as a shader writer, can express algorithms that turn flat gray surfaces into colorful, patterned, bumpy, or reflective ones. The trick is to come up with an algorithm that expresses the texture you envision. By coding this algorithm as an OpenGL shader, you too can create something out of thin air.

In this chapter, we only scratched the surface of what's possible. We created a stripe shader, but grids and checkerboards and polka dots are no more difficult. We created a toy ball with a star, but we could have created a beach ball with snowflakes. Shaders can be written to procedurally include or exclude geometry or to add bumps or grooves. Additional procedural texturing effects are illustrated later in this book. Chapter 15 shows how an irregular function (noise) can achieve a wide range of procedural texturing effects. Shaders for generating procedural textures with a more complex mathematical function (the Mandelbrot and Julia sets) and for creating non-photorealistic effects are also described later in the book.

Procedural textures are mathematically precise, are easy to parameterize, and don't require large amounts of texture memory. The end goal of a vertex shader/fragment shader pair is to produce a color value (and possibly a depth value) that will be written into the frame buffer. Because the OpenGL Shading Language is a procedural programming language, the only limit to this computation is your imagination.