Some materials of Lighthouse3D have been translated to Turkish by Mümin Güler and are available at http://opengltr.blogspot.com/. The contents include most of the GLUT tutorial, GLSL tutorial, and picking tutorial.
May 222011
Very Simple Font Library – Text rendering is very useful to display information on top of a 3D world. VSFL aims at providing users with the ability to render bitmapped text in an OpenGL application using the core profile.
With immediate mode gone in core OpenGL versions, so are the vast majority of font libs that worked with OpenGL. Immediate mode was terribly slow, and code wise very extensive. Vertex Buffers are clearly the way to go. This lib uses VAOs and vertex buffers to render text.
May 112011
One of the features that was not selected to be part of the core functionality was matrix handling. Previously we had OpenGL and GLU functions that provided the means for easily setting the camera, defining projections, and performing geometric transformations on graphical objects.
The Very Simple Matrix Library (VSML) aims at providing users with a functionality similar to the one available up to OpenGL 3.2. I’ve been using OpenGL for a long time and those matrix handling functions served most of my purposes when programming graphics, hence I grew fond of them. I missed them in the new OpenGL versions so I decided to write a simple lib to perform the same tasks in a very similar way.
Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming is almost an online book on core OpenGL. It covers a lot of ground, from drawing a triangle to HDR. The index promises a continuation onto texturing, render targets, and advanced lighting.
The Basics of the Art of Lighting is a three part tutorial by Audri Phillips from Intel. Autodesk Maya is the tool used in this tutorial, but the concepts are universal and useful to learn in order to understand the light interactions that occur in the real world.
Ultimately, lighting is about controlling and shaping light and shadows, reflections, refractions, and even color-whether you do it on a computer or on a film set. This kind of control requires an understanding of how light works, the aesthetic art of lighting, and techniques for lighting. This knowledge helps you develop your eye so that you can look with understanding at your image, clearly see it, and know what needs to be done. By looking and learning as much as you can about color and lighting, you can decide which information to use to create your lighting design-be it naturalistic or stylized in a myriad of ways.
Chapter 3 from OpenGLBook.com is now available. The new chapter covers index buffers and primitive types. Source code compatible with OpenGL 3.3 is provided.
The code for several demos in the GLUT tutorial was plagued with a int to void * conversion. While this seems to work perfectly in Windows, at least in this case, Linux users found out that it did not even compile.
The code has been updated and hopefully the problem is gone. Please do report any problems you find. I’m sure there must be some bugs still on the loose…
Apr 202011
ShaderGen is an old tool from 3D labs, but its usefulness is not gone. The tool creates shaders that mimic the results of a set of fixed function state. There is a large set of options to define a state as available in OpenGL compatibility mode. Lighting, Fog, and all the other features that are gone in core profiles. Select the options you desire, check the result with fixed functionality, and then press “generate”. The tool creates the shaders that emulate those fixed function features. It only produces GLSL 1.2 code, but conversion shouldn’t be an issue.
Apr 192011
ShareCG is a site with a huge amount of modelling tutorials, 3D models for download, and textures.
The Lighthouse3D OpenGL View Frustum Culling Tutorial has been ported to the new site. Bug reports and suggestions are most welcome.
