A good plan for learning OpenGL

Tigro · 2014-03-08T05:35:37

This year at my Uni, we're starting a course of OpenGL. The professor gave us full freedom as to what library we use along with it and what version of OpenGL we use for our projects but the lectures will be centered around FreeGLUT and OpenGL 2.1. Could anybody more accustomed to OpenGL suggest me whether I should stick to such couple or choose something different? I have absolutely no experience with OpenGL, if that matters. Also, as for the language I don't have any specific preferences. If I were to point one or two I like the most, I'd probably say C++ and Python. Of course I tried googling it and asking around but couldn't find anything - I just heard that FreeGLUT is quite basic and there are more convenient and more rewarding library to learn like SFML, GML and SDL. Also, apparently 2.1 is quite old version of OpenGL and the newer ones - based solely on shaders or so I've heard - are the standard which should be used... Being quite confused on the matter, I kindly ask for your opinions. Which version should I learn if that's my start with OpenGL? What library to go with it?

Graphics and GPU Programming Programming OpenGL

Started by Tigro March 06, 2014 09:36 PM

9 comments, last by timothyjlaird 10 years, 1 month ago

timothyjlaird

604

March 08, 2014 05:35 AM

You said any 'version' of OpenGL...does that make OpenGL ES2 an option? If so I would recommend WebGL. Not as full featured as OpenGL but it has been a good learning tool to get me started. Easy to show off your work too since it'll run in most browsers (only exception is IE and Android browsers are hit/miss). I've been able to use Google Drive for hosting which is free (although you have to jump through a few hoops to make it work). All you need for WebGL is coding knowledge of Javascript/GLSLES/OPENGLES API calls and a bare minimum of HTML5.

This guy did a really good tutorial job...

http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?page_id=1217

Good book and some JS libraries to get you started. His library handles most of the matrix stuff for you...

https://sites.google.com/site/webglbook/

Good luck.