We can't possibly imagine a book about OpenGL without rendering, and neither could the authors of this book.

António Ramires Fernandes and Bruno Oliveira provide a use case for the new OpenGL 4 tessellation pipeline through terrain rendering in their chapter "GPU Tessellation: We Still Have a LOD of Terrain to Cover," providing an entirely GPU-based method for continuous level of detail maintaining a high level of fidelity to the original mesh.

Sébastien Hillaire brings us to a parallel universe where rendering is defined by lines in his chapter "Antialiased Volumetric Lines Using Shader-Based Extrusion." He comes back on the line primitives exposed by OpenGL and their issues before bringing perspective to line rendering thanks to two approaches: one based on the vertex shader stage and one based on the geometry shader stage for perspective correct and antialiased lines.

Stefan Gustavson leads us close to new borders through his chapter "2D Shape Rendering by Distance Fields," allowing perfectly antialiased contours. He is pushing his concept to font rendering and distance field-based effects.

Benjamin Encz analyses WebGL font rendering in his chapter "Efficient Text Rendering in WebGL" by describing canvas and bitmap-based methods. He concludes his chapter with a performance analysis with both the frame rate and the memory footprint in mind.

Dzmitry Malyshau discusses an approach inspired by Blender in his chapter "Layered Textures Rendering Pipeline." He aims at providing more flexibility to the rendering pipeline to handle complex object materials so that artists may express their creativity during the producing while maintaining real-time performance.

Charles de Rousiers and Matt Pettineo present a method for "Depth of Field with Bokeh Rendering." Their method, developed around OpenGL 4 hardware atomic counter, image load and store, and indirect draw, provides a level of performance for real-time application.

Finally, Jochem van der Spek introduces a technique he calls "Shadow Proxies," which provides, for appropriate scenarios, real-time soft shadows with color bleeding.

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