I can't really suggest OpenGL books. Just beware that books older than 2010 may describe OpenGL 2, which is very obsolete and inefficient.
-
OpenGL documentation
-
Step-by-step guides
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YouTube:
- ThinMatrix, an author of OpenGL tutorials, and the sole creator of Equilinox game
- The Cherno, an author of OpenGL tutorials and the creator of Hazel game engine
- Victor Gordan, follows Learnopengl.com guide in a video format
- Brian Will, awesome explanations of OpenGL and computer graphics concepts
- Jamie King has a few well-explaining OpenGL and computer graphics videos
- Scratchapixel.com - quite a few good articles on computer graphics, ray tracing
- Real-time rendering courses hosted by SIGRAPH conference presentations from computer graphics leaders, posted every year since 2006 to 2021
- Foundations of Game Engine Development by Eric Lengyel - a legendary 4-books series about computer graphics math, rendering, materials, physics
- Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics, Third Edition a bit older book by Eric Lengyel
- Computer Graphics from Scratch: A Programmer's Introduction to 3D Rendering by Gabriel Gambetta - I haven't read it yet, but seems easy and fun
- YouTube
- Sebastian Lague, definitely check it out, every video is a joy to watch
- Casey Muratori, a very talented programmer and an author of over 1000 hours of live game coding videos (doubt anyone could watch it completely)
- The Art of Code, teaches how to create very cool looking fragment shaders (not OpenGL, but rather Shadertoy which is 99% similar to OpenGL fragment shaders)
- Martin Donald, has only a few short ideos, but extremely interesting and well explained
- javidx9, makes a series of deliberately old-school graphics approaches, but very well explained
- thebennybox, a collection of very good explanations of graphics, and graphics optimizations
We will be using a few Python libraries. Why? OpenGL only can manage GPU drawing (configuring GPU, sending/receiving data to GPU), it can't make windows and user interfaces in your operating system, it doesn't include mathematical primitives common in computer graphics, it's doesn't have anything for data parsing (e.g. 3D model files) and decoding (e.g. uncompressing JPEG or PNG images).
Thus, we'll use:
- PyOpenGL (plus PyOpenGl_accelerate) - provides access to OpenGL API from Python
- PyGLFW - manages cross-platform creation of windows (also available in C/C++ programming languages) and interation using keyboard/mouse
- Pyrr - math functions commonly used in computer graphics
- Imgui - fancy user-interface elements
- Pillow - encoding and decoding image files
- PyWavefront - decoding 3D models files in OBJ format
Option 1. (preferred) Anaconda environment:
conda create --name gl
conda activate gl
conda install -c conda-forge pyopengl-accelerate pyglfw pyrr pillow
pip install imgui[glfw] pywavefront
Option 2. If you don't mind polluting your default Python environment, then you can globally install like this:
pip install PyOpenGL PyOpenGL_accelerate glfw pyrr pillow imgui[glfw] pywavefront
You may have troubles when installing those packages.
- To fix PyOpenGL, try to follow its official page
PyOpenGL, scroll to
Downloading and Installationparagraph and follow the instructions - To fix GLFW, try to follow its official repository and install additional library for your OS
The most relevant version of the code is on the main branch of the repository. The
repository contains:
- Lecture demos
- Homework demos, and those are implemented as "fill in the gaps" programs. Complete to see the demo!
This command should open a window with a running visualization, and UI controls that allow your interaction.
python run.py
If you're debugging one particular demo, it may be convenient to start the application with this demo right away.
python run.py hw1
If may also want to tweak the default UI parameters in a ui_defaults.json
config of the particular demo folder.
It might be challenging for some people to write their code and then try to get the latest updates from this repository. In order to preserve your own sanity, I suggest the following workflow:
- If you need to change files, create a separate
gitbranch first
git branch my_branch
- Before writing your code, make sure you're on your branch (and not
mainbranch).
git checkout my_branch
- Make your changes in the files, commit them whenever you like
git add myfile_1.py myfile_2.py
# or if you're confident:
git add --all
# then
git commit -m "Message of my commit"
- Now suppose that you want to download the latest changes from this
repository. Even while you're on you own branch
my_branch, you should still be able to execute this, to get the latest updates
git fetch origin main:main
This will update content of the main branch, so your code is preserved. In order
to combine updates and your own code, you better commit your changes as shown in
item #3 of this list.
Next, execute this, while still being on my_branch
git merge main
This will attempt merging the code. If you're lucky and your code doesn't conflict with the updates, then the process will finish successfully. Otherwise you may see the message
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.
This means, that you'll have to manually resolve the conflicts. This topic is quite complicated, so either:
- Try manual conflict resolutions
- Install a graphical tool for merging, and use
git mergetool - Contact me for help!
After fixing the conflicts, there's a chance you've broken something. Try to launch the program to verify that no errors/exceptions are shown. If everything is OK, you need to continue merging
git merge --continue
You may be prompted to enter a commit message to finally finish the merge. And after that the updates should be added. Run the program again to double check that everything works.