Advanced Majigs

Today wrapped up all the advanced parts in the GLSL section. First off was geometry shaders, or shaders that allowed creation of extra geometry. This can be something as simple as normal visualization or as complex as furs (though we did normal visualization here):

As for the other advanced things, I also looked into anti-aliasing (very simple with GLFW, but requires a multisampled framebuffer otherwise) and instanced rendering, which allows matrices in the vertex coordinates for proper instanced rendering.

Now onto lighting! Blinn-Phong shading helps separate the Phong boys from the Blinn men, as it solves the problem with janky view direction and light direction angle differences higher than 90 degrees, which leads to specular artifacts below:

In this case, we just calculate the halfway vector between the view and light direction and see how close it is to the normal for specularity. Voila!

This advanced lighting is getting exciting!