Computer Graphics Shader Lab Framework

Eurographics 2017 - Educational track

Antoine Toisoul, Daniel Rueckert, Bernhard Kainz

ShaderLab Framework [1] is a teaching framework that we use at Imperial College London to teach the basics of computer graphics (course CO 317). Our computer graphics course is taught in a way that student learn graphics in theory and in practice with a set of lectures and labs. Unfortunately, our course is short (8 weeks), hence students do not have enough time to fully understand low level graphics APIs such as OpenGL in order to make their own graphics application. ShaderLab Framework makes GLSL programming accessible to students with an IDE-like environment in which they can directly code their GLSL shaders and visualize the result.

Figure : ShaderLab Framework. The left window is the rendering window. Several tabs and options are available for the students to modify the scene. The right window is the code editor where the students can code their own GLSL shaders.

Figure : ShaderLab Framework. The left window is the rendering window. Several tabs and options are available for the students to modify the scene. The right window is the code editor where the students can code their own GLSL shaders.

The framework has many features including :

  • render window

  • two pass rendering pipeline for screen space effects

  • mouse-based interaction

  • shader compilation log output

  • Shader editor with syntax highlighter

  • render-to-texture wrapped shader pipeline

  • Object selection

  • wireframe mode

  • display of origin

  • backface culling

  • screenshot tool

  • Camera parameter adjustments

  • direct manipulation widget for Model, View and Projection Matrices

  • automatic evaluation of user uniforms in uniform editor; default material and matrix uniforms are ignored

  • simple numeric material editor

  • GPU info output

  • saving and loading of whole shader pipelines (with XML files) or individual shaders

  • full OpenGL 4.x support

The fact that the entire rendering pipeline can be saved as a single XML file makes it very easy to use as a teaching tool. Indeed, students can code their GLSL shaders, save them into a single XML file that is submitted. Then markers can directly load the entire pipeline with the XML file and visualize the rendering and the code at the same time. The tool has been intensely tested by more than 100 students every year since 2017.

References

[1] Accessible GLSL Shader Programming. Antoine Toisoul, Daniel Rueckert, Bernhard Kainz, , Eurographics 2017 - Education Papers, 2017

Antoine Toisoul