Combine Texture + Fragment

OpenGL allows us to combine the texture color with the fragments color in several ways. In the next table some of the available modes for the RGBA mode are presented:

In the table above Ct and At represent the color and alpha value of the texture element, Cf and Af represent the color and alpha value of the fragment (prior to applying the texture), and finally C and A represent the final color and alpha.

The example provided in the previous section is the equivalent of GL_REPLACE. Now we’re going to implement the equivalent of GL_MODULATE on a lit cube. The shaders will only compute the diffuse and ambient component with a white diffuse directional light. For the full material definition please see the lighting section.

Since we’re using lights, and therefore normals, the vertex shader must do some extra work. Namely it must transform into eye space and normalize the normal, and it must also normalize the light direction (the light direction has already been transformed into eye space by OpenGL). The vertex shader is now:

varying vec3 lightDir,normal;

void main()
{
	normal = normalize(gl_NormalMatrix * gl_Normal);

	lightDir = normalize(vec3(gl_LightSource[0].position));
	gl_TexCoord[0] = gl_MultiTexCoord0;

	gl_Position = ftransform();
}

In the fragment shader the color and alpha of the lit fragment is computed into cf and af respectively. The rest of the shader is just computing the GL_MODULATE formulas presented above.

varying vec3 lightDir,normal;
uniform sampler2D tex;

void main()
{
	vec3 ct,cf;
	vec4 texel;
	float intensity,at,af;
	intensity = max(dot(lightDir,normalize(normal)),0.0);

	cf = intensity * (gl_FrontMaterial.diffuse).rgb +
				  gl_FrontMaterial.ambient.rgb;
	af = gl_FrontMaterial.diffuse.a;
	texel = texture2D(tex,gl_TexCoord[0].st);

	ct = texel.rgb;
	at = texel.a;
	gl_FragColor = vec4(ct * cf, at * af);

}

GL_REPLACE	GL_MODULATE

A Shader Designer project is available in here.