Lesson Index

The lessons on this page may contain mistakes, poor commenting, and should not be considered the best resource to learn OpenGL from. What you do with the code is up to you. I am merely trying to make the learning process a little easier for those people new to OpenGL. If you are serious about learning OpenGL, you should spend the money and invest in the following books: Red Book Version 1.4 (4th ed.): 0321173481, Blue Book Version 1.4 (4th ed.): 032117383X, Orange Book Version 1.4 (Shading Language): 0321197895. Although they can be difficult for the new OpenGL programmer to understand, they are by far the best books written on the subject of OpenGL. Another book I would recommend is the OpenGL Superbible, although opinions vary. It is also important that you have a solid understanding of the language you plan to use. Although I do comment the non-GL lines, I am self-taught, and may not always write proper or even good code. It's up to you to take what you have learned from this site and apply it to projects of your own. Play around with the code, read books, ask me questions if need be. Once you have surpassed the code on this site or even before, check out some of the more professional sites such as OpenGL.org. Also be sure to visit the many OpenGL links on my page. Each site I link to is an incredible asset to the OpenGL community. Most of these sites are run by talented individuals that not only know their GL, they also program a lot better than I do. Please keep all of this in mind while browsing my site. I hope you enjoy what I have to offer! One final note, if you see code that you feel is similar to someone else's code, please contact me. I assure you, any code I borrow from or learn from either comes from the MSDN or from sites created to help teach people in a similar way that my site teaches GL. I never intentionally take code, and never would without giving the proper person credit. There may be instances where I get code from a free site not knowing that site took it from someone else, so if that happens, please contact me. I will either rewrite the code, or remove it from my program. Most the code should be original however, I only borrow when I absolutely have no idea how to accomplish something, and even then I make sure I understand the code before I decide to include it in my program. If you spot mistakes in any of the lessons, no matter how tiny the mistake may be, please let me know. One important thing to note about my base code is that it was written in 1997. It has undergone many changes, and it is definitely not borrowed from any other sites. It will more than likely be altered in the future. If I am not the one that modifies it, the person responsible for the changes will be credited.

Fullscreen AntiAliasing Need a tutorial that will make your OpenGL applications look better? A big problem we all run into is aliasing. That is, the square edged "jaggies" that exist on diagonal lines in relation to the square pixels that exist on your screen. In this tutorial you will use Anti-Aliasing to smudge those "jaggies" in order to create a smoother edge for objects. We achieve this through "Multisampling". Fullscreen AntiAliasing is something that non-realtime rendering programs have always had an advantage in. However, with current hardware, we're able to pull off the same effect real time. The ARB_MULTISAMPLE extension allows us to do this. Like any other Extension based tutorial, if your card does not support the extension used, the effect will not work on your machine or the program may fail to run. This tutorial was written by Colt "MainRoach" McAnlis. If you enjoy it, let him know!  CG Vertex Shader Using vertex and fragment (or pixel) shaders to do some rendering dirty work can have numerous benefits. The most obvious is the movement of some of the graphics related CPU load off the CPU and onto the GPU. Cg provides a (reasonably) simple language for writing very powerful shaders. This tutorial has multiple aims. The first is to present a simple vertex shader that actually does something, without introducing unnecessary lighting etc… The second is to provide the basic mechanism for running the vertex shader with visible results using OpenGL. As such, it is aimed at the beginner interested in Cg who has a little experience in OpenGL. This tutorial was written by Owen Bourne. If you enjoy it, please take the time to email him and let him know!   ArcBall Rotation Wouldn’t it be great to rotate your model at will, just by using the mouse? With an ArcBall you can do just that. In this tutorial Terence J. Grant will touch on his implementation and considerations for adding ArcBall rotation to your own projects. His implementation of the ArcBall class is based on Bretton Wade’s, which is based on Ken Shoemake’s from the Graphic Gems series of books. However, his version has some bug fixing and optimizations. The example code was originally based on lesson 5. It has been spruced up a bit, and now includes code to render a torus, complete with normals. If you enjoy this tutorial send Terence an email and let him know!

I am not a guru programmer. I am an average programmer, learning new things about OpenGL every day. I do not claim to know everything. I do not guarantee my code is bug free. I have made every effort humanly possible to eliminate all bugs but this is not always an easy task. Please keep this in mind while going through the lessons! Back To NeHe Productions!