OpenGL Work
Arden Software currently uses OpenGL for all its 3D based rendering which gave me an excuse to start playing around with OpenGL and getting to grips with its rendering pipeline. Hopefully this is going to be an on going project that I will continually add to over time.
I will be following a few OpenGL Tutorials initially just to get used to the process and pipeline but will then move on to create a few applications, possibly games.
I will be following a few OpenGL Tutorials initially just to get used to the process and pipeline but will then move on to create a few applications, possibly games.
Tutorial 1: Basic Triangle
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The first Tutorial is basically getting used to the initialization of an OpenGL window and basic render functions. At this point it does seem much more simple compared to the DirectX equivalent, although it took a while to initially create a project with all the files included.
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I made a Christmas Tree, A triangle seemed a bit boring.
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Tutorial 2: The Spinning Triangle
The second tutorial introduced some other GLUT functions such as glRotatef, gluLookAt and the glutIdleFunc. This is the first point in which any use of matrices has been introduced. It has become apparent how fundamental callback functions are to OpenGL. The callback functions are set before the glutMainLoop, and then within the glutMainLoop the function is called if there is one available.
Tutorials 3 & 4: Colours, Shapes, Input and Camera Movement
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In tutorial 3 I worked mostly on just adding some colour to the triangles I had already created using some keyboard input. The keyboard input was simply another callback function. I'm really starting to like the look of callback functions and can see they are a great programming technique.
In the next tutorial there were various shapes introduced such as spheres and cones which were both used to create a snowman which you can see in the video. There was also the introduction of camera movement which was some further matrices work. |
Further Progress
After doing a few of these tutorials I realised that they never delved into the world of shaders and was in fact just a tutorial for the OpenGL fixed pipeline. Since then I found some great tutorials on www.open.gl which allowed me to progress much further. All of this progress you can see on my blog, or if you want to see my most advanced stuff then have a look at my own renderer called JBEngine.
