Some More Shader Questions

[synhyborex]

The boards seem a little dead today? Geez I feel bad being the two most recent posts. However, a man has needs

I've gotten significantly further in my program, but I need help with two things: toggling between shaders and testing to see if I've been calculating my normals correctly in a triangle mesh.

In regards to the normals, I just want to know a good method for testing. I know I can subtract the value of the normal from the color so that all normals that are approximately unit length on a single axis (e.g. (1,0,0) or (0,1,0)) will be shaded red, green, or blue, depending on what value remains, but if it's done correctly, should I be seeing distinct shades of RGB, or should I be seeing the in-between as well, such as purple or orange?

As for toggling between shaders, I need a pointer in the right direction. By toggling between shaders I mean between parts of the vertex and fragment shaders. I realize both run each time I run the program, but I would like to have it so that I could have PARTS of the code run from each depending on a certain mode input. I've tried setting up a handler to take input keyboard keys as int values and pass them to an appropriate variable in both the vertex and fragment shaders, but if I try to use a flag with that parameter and put the code inside if statements, a rendering results in a uniformly colored image.

I'm not quite sure where to go from here. I've checked to see if the values are being passed incorrectly or if there aren't proper handles, but that all checks out. I'd post code but there's quite a bit.

[Shakti]

Assuming your shader code looks something along these lines (very simplified):

// Vertex shader
in vec3 normal;
in vec3 position;

out vec3 Color;

void main()
{
    Color = normal;
    gl_Position = vec4( position, 1.0 );
}
// Fragment shader
in vec3 Color;

out vec4 outColor;

void main()
{
    outColor = vec4( Color, 1.0 );
}

You will see the colors mix between the vertices.

Can't you just write debug shaders and "production" shaders and then depending on if you are in debug mode or in production mode you just choose which shader program to use, that is you perform everything up to linking the shader program but the selection of program is done at render time? Although it sounds very weird that you are not able to just use an integer uniform to select which mode to use.

[synhyborex]

Assuming your shader code looks something along these lines (very simplified):

Yes, that's the gist of it, though my actual color takes into account calculations for both Phong and Gouraud shading in the fragment and vertex shaders, respectively. The calculation part is what I want to switch.

You will see the colors mix between the vertices.

Am I understanding this correctly in assuming this means that if I can see the purples and the yellows and oranges I'm doing it right?

Can't you just write debug shaders and "production" shaders and then depending on if you are in debug mode or in production mode you just choose which shader program to use, that is you perform everything up to linking the shader program but the selection of program is done at render time? Although it sounds very weird that you are not able to just use an integer uniform to select which mode to use.

I could write the debug and protection but I have no idea what they are: I'm fairly new to lighting and writing my own shaders. I'm going to mess around with sending in the uniform int through a handler some more, maybe there's something I missed while coding for 11 hours straight