Our current lighting model is a bit primitive. We are going to modify it to use what is called Blinn-Phong shading.

This model is still very often used in commercial games, and has only recently been superseded by physically-based rendering.

So what exactly is wrong with our current lighting?

When light hits an object, the light rays are split in two:

• Some rays will be reflected in all directions. This is diffuse reflection.
• Some rays will be reflected perpendicularly to the surface's normal, as if the object was a mirror. This is specular reflection.

When you take an individual fragment, the fragment's color is a combination of its diffuse and specular reflections. Our current shader only takes into account diffuse reflection and not specular.

So how does the calculation look like?

#version 140

in vec3 v_normal;
in vec3 v_position;

out vec4 color;

uniform vec3 u_light;

const vec3 ambient_color = vec3(0.2, 0.0, 0.0);
const vec3 diffuse_color = vec3(0.6, 0.0, 0.0);
const vec3 specular_color = vec3(1.0, 1.0, 1.0);

void main() {
    float diffuse = max(dot(normalize(v_normal), normalize(u_light)), 0.0);

    vec3 camera_dir = normalize(-v_position);
    vec3 half_direction = normalize(normalize(u_light) + camera_dir);
    float specular = pow(max(dot(half_direction, normalize(v_normal)), 0.0), 16.0);

    color = vec4(ambient_color + diffuse * diffuse_color + specular * specular_color, 1.0);
}

The first line of the main function is more or less the same as what our previous shader was, except that this time we fix the value so that it cannot be negative. This was not necessary before because we used the mix function (which automatically handles this), but now we must do it.

Then we calculate camera_dir, which is the direction of the camera relative to the object. Since the camera is always at (0, 0, 0), this is calculated simply by taking the opposite of the position of the vector.

Afterwards we calculate half_direction, which is the direction of the camera relative to the light if the camera and the light were both one unit away from the object. We then calculate the cosine of the angle between half_direction and v_normal with dot(half_direction, normalize(v_normal)).

If the half_direction is perpendicular to the normal, that means that the light rays coming from the light bounce directly into the camera. The result of the calculation will be 1.0. Then we ensure that this value is positive and elevate it to the power 16. This means that values like 0.98 will stay high, but values like 0.8 will almost drop to 0. The role of this power is to mark a border between high values and low values. This is our specular coefficient.

The last step is to add everything together: ambient lighting (which is the lighting that is present even if there is no light source) + diffuse lighting + specular lighting. Note that in some circumstances the value can go above 1.0, but OpenGL will automatically clamp it to 1.0.

Don't forget to modify our vertex shader to pass the additional v_position attribute by adding this line at the end:

v_position = gl_Position.xyz / gl_Position.w;

And here is the result:

The big white spots are the specular reflection.

You can find the entire source code here.