title: Could a vertex shader be used for a page turn effect?
body: <p>I've done Open GL ES in the past, but quite a while ago. From what I'm reading now, it seems there is a lot more emphasis on managing your own matrix stacks and pushing your matrices directly into a vertex shader to position your objects.</p>
  
  <p>This is all well and good, but I'm just wondering how far you're meant to go with shaders. I don't know if they are only for simple things, or can I use them for a page turn effect. There will definitely be a lot of math that needs to be calculated. It feels like this is a good place to do it, but I don't have the experience to know if there are any gotchas with this.</p>
  
  <p>I was going to input a point which maps to a finger position to the shader, then the shader would offset each vertex in a mesh which makes up the page, based on the finger position.</p>
  
  <p>I'm going to attempt this in an Android App with OpenGl ES 2.0.</p>
  
  <p>So, </p>
  
  <p><strong>The Question</strong></p>
  
  <p><em>Does this seem like a reasonable approach and if not, what would be the best way of getting the most out of the graphics chip given the effect I require and moden OpenGL APIs?</em></p>
  
  <p><strong>What I've researched so far</strong></p>
  
  <p>I've read through a number of blogs and tutorials, including <a href="http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/" rel="nofollow">Tutorials for Modern Open GL</a>, but the shaders are always for lighting or just basic positioning. I'm thinking the calculations for a page turn effect might require more math than are in the shaders I've seen, but I don't know how much math in a shader would be too much!</p>
  
  <p>I know I should just give this a go and see, but I've got a bit of time until this project starts and I was just really researching at the moment!</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update</strong></p>
  
  <p>Just as an update, I recently found out there is an instruction limit for shaders, so one requirement will be that I am able to get all my page turn math within the instruction limit.</p>