OpenGL Programming

OpenGL logo

Welcome to the OpenGL Programming book. OpenGL is an API used for drawing 3D graphics. OpenGL is not a programming language; an OpenGL application is typically written in C or C++. What OpenGL does allow you to do is draw attractive, realistic 3D graphics with minimal effort. The API is typically used to interact with a GPU, to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.

You are free, and encouraged, to share and contribute to this wikibook: it is written in the spirit of free documentation, that belongs to humanity. Feel free to make copies, teach it in school or professional classes, improve the text, write comments or even new sections.

We're looking for contributors. If you know about OpenGL, feel free to leave comments, expand TODO sections and write new ones!

See also the Wikibook GLSL Programming.

Wikipedia has related information at OpenGL.

Introduction

1. About this book
2. History and Evolution of OpenGL

Setting Up OpenGL

• Installation on GNU/Linux
• Installation on Macintosh
• Installation on Windows with Code::Blocks
• Installation for Android NDK development
  • with a GLUT-like wrapper to follow the exercises
• Installation for iPhone development
• Installing GLUT

Modern OpenGL

"Modern" OpenGL is about OpenGL 2.1+, OpenGL ES 2.0+ and WebGL, with a programmable pipeline and shaders.

The basics arc

01		Tutorial 01: newcomer's introduction, first dive into shaders	02		Tutorial 02: adding more robustness to our code, transparency
03		Tutorial 03: passing information to shaders: attributes, varying and uniforms	04		Tutorial 04: transformation matrices: positioning and rotating
05		Tutorial 05: adding the 3rd dimension: a cube, plus a camera	06		Tutorial 06: textures: displaying a wooden cube
07		OBJ format: loading Suzanne the monkey from Blender	08		Navigation: navigate in 3D space and manipulate objects in our model viewer

Tutorial_drafts: ideas and notes for upcoming tutorials

The lighting arc

This series of tutorials is a C++ port of the GLSL wikibook Basic Lighting tutorials.

01		Diffuse Reflection: about per-vertex diffuse lighting and multiple light sources of different kinds	02		Specular Highlights: about per-vertex lighting
03		Two-Sided Surfaces (about two-sided per-vertex lighting)	04		Smooth Specular Highlights (about per-pixel lighting)
05		Two-Sided Smooth Surfaces (about two-sided per-pixel lighting)	06		Multiple Lights (about for-loops for handling multiple light sources)

This series of tutorials is a C++ port of the GLSL wikibook Basic Texturing tutorials.

01		Textured Spheres: about texturing a sphere	02		Lighting Textured Surfaces: about textures for diffuse lighting
03		Glossy Textures: about gloss mapping	04		Transparent Textures: about using alpha textures for discarding fragments, alpha testing, and blending
05		Layers of Textures: about multitexturing

This series of tutorials is a C++ port of the GLSL wikibook tutorials about Textures in 3D.

01		Lighting of Bumpy Surfaces: about normal mapping	02		Projection of Bumpy Surfaces: about parallax mapping
03		Cookies: about projective texture mapping for shaping light	04		Light Attenuation: about texture mapping for light attenuation and lookup tables in general
05		Projectors: about projective texture mapping for projectors

There are more tutorials to port at the GLSL wikibook!

The scientific arc

01		Graph 01: plotting a simple function, using vertex buffer objects and point sprites	02		Graph 02: plotting a graph from data in a texture
03		Graph 03: plotting borders and axes, clipping	04		Graph 04: plotting a three-dimensional graph
05		Graph 05: plotting a surface with hidden line removal

And more to come.

Selected topics

01		Virtual Trackball: intuitive object rotation with the mouse	02		Bounding box: draw a cube around your object for editing or debugging purposes
03		2D-on-3D: hardware-accelerated 2D programming	04		Video Capture: capture your animation using apitrace (C++) or JavaScript (WebGL)
05		Tea time: generating an HD teapot from Bézier surfaces	06		Stencil buffer: masking and combining
07		Quadrics: creating simple shapes with a bit of maths	08		Basic text: rendering text using the FreeType library
09		Optimized text rendering: using a texture atlas containing all glyphs	10		Object selection: unprojecting coordinates and object identification using the stencil buffer
11		Anti-Aliasing: smoothing lines	12		Particle systems: differents kinds of particle systems

The post-processing arc

01

Concepts: how to perform full-screen post-processing, first example with a simple animated wave

02

???: next effect to be decided!

Mini-portal

This series shows how to implement a teleportation system similar to Valve's Portal, step-by-step, using OpenGL.

01		Mini-Portal: a first working see-through portal	02		Mini-Portal Smooth: smooth transition, understanding the camera
03		Mini-Portal Recursive: recursive portals - display portals within portals	04		Mini-Portal Optimization: optimization with scissors

Glescraft

This series shows how to render a voxel based world, similar to Minecraft.

01		Glescraft 1: basic voxel rendering	02		Glescraft 2: removing unnecessary voxel faces
03		Glescraft 3: texturing, lighting, fog, transparency	04		Glescraft 4: first person camera controls
05		Glescraft 5: drawing only what is on screen	06		Glescraft 6: adding and removing voxels
07		Glescraft 7: using geometry shaders

Using the accumulation buffer

01		Tutorial 01: motion blur	02		Tutorial 02: full-screen supersampling anti-aliasing
03		Tutorial 03: depth of field	04		Tutorial 04: order-independent transparency

Note: not all videocards support accumulation buffer

Cutting-edge OpenGL

If you do not target old mobile devices or the web, you can upgrade to OpenGL (ES) 3.x / 4.x. It notably introduces new kinds of shaders: Geometry, Tessellation Control and Tessellation Evaluation, and Compute.

01

Tutorial 01: modify and create vertices on the fly with geometry shaders

02

Tutorial 02: dynamic mesh quality with tesselation

and lots of other features.

Code quality

01

Debugging: tips to help debug your OpenGL code

02

Performance: measuring and improving your application performance.

Appendices

• OpenGL ES 2.0 Overview: OpenGL ES 2.0 (OpenGL for Embedded Systems 2.0) concepts and its differences to normal OpenGL
• Migrating from 1.x to 2.x: how to upgrade your code to use modern OpenGL
• Glossary: what do all those new weird words mean?
• APIs, Libraries and acronyms: how all acronyms relate to each others
• OpenGL Shading Language: elements of GLSL programming
• Shaders reference: input and output variables list
• Team: contributors to this wikibook
• Download code: wikibooks-opengl code repository

Legacy OpenGL 1.x

"Legacy" OpenGL is about OpenGL 1.x and OpenGL ES 1.x, with a fixed pipeline and no shaders.

Starting Tutorial

1. Setting Up A Programming Environment On Windows
2. Setting Up OpenGL In The Programming Environment
3. Drawing Primitives
   1. Immediate Mode
   2. Display Lists
   3. Vertex Arrays
4. Basic Transformations
   1. Translation
   2. Rotation
   3. Scaling
   4. Custom Transformations

Basics

1. Structure of a Typical OpenGL Application
2. Drawing Rectangles
3. Drawing Lines and Points
4. Drawing Simple 2D Shapes
5. OpenGL Naming Conventions
6. Using Color
7. Viewing Transformations
8. Drawing Simple 3D Objects
9. Perspective versus Orthographic Projections

Intermediate

1. Smoothing Polygons with Normals
2. Adding Lights
3. Using Materials
4. Using Textures
5. Using Mipmaps
6. Drawing Complex Polygons Using Tessellation

Advanced

1. Optimizing OpenGL Code
2. Drawing Shadows
3. Drawing Using Quadrics
4. Drawing Using NURBS and Curves
5. Ambient Occlusion

Appendices

1. Coordinate Transformations
2. Understanding Transformation Matrices
3. OpenGL Library Reference. functions and type reference for gl.h glu.h and glut.h
4. Why OpenGL Exists and What It's Good For
5. Migrating from 1.x to 2.x: how to upgrade your code to use modern OpenGL

External links

See also the Wikibook GLSL Programming.

Wikibooks

• GLSL Programming: book on the use of the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) in Unity 3 and Blender 2.5, with much information on lighting and texturing.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro: comprehensive book on using the Blender 3D modeling environment
• Open source, cross-platform IDE's for exploring pixel-based graphics on the GPU using GLSL:
  • Fragmentarium
  • Shadertoy

Ports

The following websites provide conversion of the tutorials to other programming languages or platforms:

• Official code repository contains the main SDL2 version, but also GLUT and WebGL ports
• port to Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) (blog)
• not really a port, but commented, progressive version of the tutorials code as the author follows them

Freely-licensed documentation and samples

OpenGL 3.0+

• Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming: another modern OpenGL tutorial, requiring v3.3 or later, MIT license (source repository)
• Introduction and examples for OpenGL 3.3
• OpenGL Samples Pack: written in C++ based on the "core profile" specifications, aimed at easing upgrades to new OpenGL versions and features, MIT license (source repository)

OpenGL 1.x

• Paul's projects: OpenGL 1.x, two tutorials on shadow mapping and bump mapping, with code under the MIT license

OpenGL ES 2.0

• OpenGL ES 2.0 Reference Pages: official reference man pages, SGI Free Software B License
• Learn OpenGL ES: Detailed, step-by-step OpenGL ES tutorials in Java for Android, and a bit of WebGL as well, CC BY-SA 3.0 license (source repository − Apache License 2)

• A modern OpenGL FAQ: GFDL license
• OpenGLContext Python Tutorials: basic tutorials using PyOpenGL (BSD-style licenses)

WebGL

• Gregg Tavares’ WebGL articles: detailed 2D and 3D basics with emphasing on matrix operations; lots of diagrams and interactive animations (source code − MIT license)
• WebGL at Mozilla Developer Network: WebGL overview, including embedding videos; CC BY-SA for articles, MIT and public domain for source code
• three.js: collection of demos using the three.js WebGL framework; source code is MIT but models/data may be non-free

Non-freely-licensed documentation

• NeHe's OpenGL tutorial: OpenGL 1.x
• Collection of OpenGL fundamentals tutorials using C++ and Windows API: OpenGL 1.x
• ZeusCMD OpenGL Tutorials: OpenGL 1.x
• OpenGL Programming Examples: OpenGL 1.x,

Websites

• OpenGL Lighting Model Tutorial with Examples
• Official OpenGL Website
• Mesa, an open-sourced 3D graphics library almost identical to OpenGL

Further reading

• OpenGL Architecture Review Board, et al: OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 2, Fifth Edition, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-321-33573-2
• OpenGL Architecture Review Board, et al: OpenGL Reference Manual: The Official Reference Document to OpenGL, Version 1.4, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-321-17383-X
• Wright, Richard S. Jr and Lipchak, Benjamin: OpenGL SuperBible, Third Edition, Sams Publishing, ISBN 0-672-32601-9

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