The Lighthouse3D GLSL Core Tutorial has been updated with a few sections, namely how to check the result of the compilation and linking operations, freeing up resources, and how do shaders communicate between themselves on modern OpenGL. The shader interfaces are presented and discussed, with examples and a comparison between the several mechanisms OpenGL provides.
Oct 262012
A Lighthouse3D short tutorial on OpenGL atomic buffers is now available in here. The tutorial covers both the OpenGL and GLSL definition and usage. As the official documentation, and demos on the net are not abundant, it is difficult to be too assertive in some issues. Everything on the tutorial has been tested and it works perfectly with recent NVIDIA beta drivers. Unfortunately, a few things seem not to work with AMD catalyst 12.9 drivers. Anyway, check it out, and let me know if I missed something, or if you find any bugs.
Shaderific is a great iOS application for OpenGL ES shader learning. The app provides the source code for the vertex and fragment shaders for 18 built-in demo shaders, and it allows the creation of new ones. Many 3D objects (including the required teapot) are available, and material and lighting can also be set. There is a free version that lets us try it out, but the changes are not kept once the app is closed.
Oct 122012
Glow and Bloom is the latest article on this
great series that presents graphic effects with source code, theory, and a WebGL demo.
The series already has 8 articles starting with the basics of lighting and exploring several effects. Many more are to be released according to the index.
Oct 102012
Self Shadow has published a collection of links for the 2012 Siggraph’s materials. This includes courses, BOFs, talks, posters, etc… Also available is a collection of links for Siggraph 2011.
This course is the next installment in the established series of SIGGRAPH courses on real-time rendering. It presents the best graphics practices and research from the game-development community and provides practical and production-proven algorithms. The focus of the course is on the intersection between the game-development community and state-of-the-art 3D graphics research, and the potential for cross-pollination of knowledge in future games and other interactive applications.
Slides are available in here.
Sep 242012
Patrick Cozzy, Christophe Riccio (eds)
Since I’m one of the authors of a couple of chapters in this book I’ll refrain from commenting on it. Check out the companion site, it is full of information, includes 5 sample chapters and all the companion source code.
More information about this title at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Jul 212012
I’ve been working for some time with wxWidgets. The only thing I’ve missed, regarding OpenGL, is the ability to define my own OpenGL context, in particular Core profile and Debug contexts.
To be able to set a context we, or the toolkit we’re using, must use the wglCreateContextAttribsARB function, as defined in the WGL_ARB_create_context extension. As it happens, wxWidgets uses wglCreateContext, hence no OpenGL context can be explicitly defined using the provided source code for the current release (2.9.4).
As OpenGL context setting is not yet in the roadmap for future releases of wxWidgets, nor is it in its Todo List, I’m sharing a solution for this issue.
The solution is for the Windows platform, but other platforms should be as easy to change as well.
Note: I make no claim regarding the quality of the solution, it worked for me, and that’s all I claim. If anyone knows of a better way of doing this comments are most welcome, as they may prove useful for other readers (and me as well 
).
The University of California UC Davis, has an excellent introductory course on Computer Graphics (21 lectures, close to an hour each), available through iTunes University. The course is given by Kenneth Joy, who does an amazing job, providing very clear and easy to follow lectures.
The course objectives are described in here.
