GLSL Core Tutorial Update – Playing with Texture Coordinates

Based only on texture coordinates some interesting shaders can be built. In this new section of the GLSL Core Tutorial, a few common shaders, namely the stripes and grid shaders, will be explored. Basic antialising and GLSL functions mix and smoothstep will also be discussed. Source code and a VS2010 solution are also provided.

OpenGL Framebuffer Objects Tutorial

OpenGL renders to framebuffers. By default OpenGL renders to screen, the default framebuffer that commonly contains a color and a depth buffer. This is great for many purposes where a pipeline consists of a single pass, a pass being a sequence of shaders. For instance a simple pass can have only a vertex and a … Read more

Update on GLSL Core Tutorial

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.

Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games – Siggraph 2012 Slides

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 … Read more

Working with Core OpenGL in WX Wigets

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 🙂 ).

Read more

ITunes course on Computer Graphics

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.