How do I get the current color of a fragment?

Question

I'm trying to wrap my head around shaders in GLSL, and I've found some useful resources and tutorials, but I keep running into a wall for something that ought to be fundamental and trivial: how does my fragment shader retrieve the color of the current fragment?

You set the final color by saying gl_FragColor = whatever, but apparently that's an output-only value. How do you get the original color of the input so you can perform calculations on it? That's got to be in a variable somewhere, but if anyone out there knows its name, they don't seem to have recorded it in any tutorial or documentation that I've run across so far, and it's driving me up the wall.

Answer 1

The fragment shader receives gl_Color and gl_SecondaryColor as vertex attributes. It also gets four varying variables: gl_FrontColor, gl_FrontSecondaryColor, gl_BackColor, and gl_BackSecondaryColor that it can write values to. If you want to pass the original colors straight through, you'd do something like:

gl_FrontColor = gl_Color;
gl_FrontSecondaryColor = gl_SecondaryColor;
gl_BackColor = gl_Color;
gl_BackSecondaryColor = gl_SecondaryColor;

Fixed functionality in the pipeline following the vertex shader will then clamp these to the range [0..1], and figure out whether the vertex is front-facing or back-facing. It will then interpolate the chosen (front or back) color like usual. The fragment shader will then receive the chosen, clamped, interpolated colors as gl_Color and gl_SecondaryColor.

For example, if you drew the standard "death triangle" like:

glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES);
    glColor3f(0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f);
    glVertex3f(-1.0f, 0.0f, -1.0f);
    glColor3f(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);
    glVertex3f(1.0f, 0.0f, -1.0f);
    glColor3f(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);
    glVertex3d(0.0, -1.0, -1.0);
glEnd();

Then a vertex shader like this:

void main(void) {
    gl_Position = ftransform();
    gl_FrontColor = gl_Color;
}

with a fragment shader like this:

void main() {
    gl_FragColor = gl_Color;
}

will transmit the colors through, just like if you were using the fixed-functionality pipeline.