OpenGL(R) Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL(R), Version 1.4 [Paperback]

The OpenGL graphics system is a software interface to graphics hardware. (The GL stands for Graphics Library.) It allows you to create interactive programs that produce color images of moving three-dimensional objects. With OpenGL, you can control computer-graphics technology to produce realistic pictures or ones that depart from reality in imaginative ways. This guide explains how to program with the OpenGL graphics system to deliver the visual effect you want.

This guide has 14 chapters. The first five chapters present basic information that you need to understand to be able to draw a properly colored and lit three-dimensional object on the screen.

The remaining chapters explain how to optimize or add sophisticated features to your three-dimensional scene. You might choose not to take advantage of many of these features until you're more comfortable with OpenGL. Particularly advanced topics are noted in the text where they occur.

In addition, there are several appendices that you will likely find useful:

Finally, an extensive Glossary defines the key terms used in this guide.

The fourth edition of the OpenGL Programming Guide includes new and updated material, covering both OpenGL Version 1.3 and 1.4:

Coverage of the following new core capabilities of OpenGL Version 1.3 have been added:

Coverage of these OpenGL Version 1.4 core features:

Bug fixes

This guide assumes only that you know how to program in the C language and that you have some background in mathematics (geometry, trigonometry, linear algebra, calculus, and differential geometry). Even if you have little or no experience with computer-graphics technology, you should be able to follow most of the discussions in this book. Of course, computer graphics is a huge subject, so you may want to enrich your learning experience with supplemental reading:

Another great place for all sorts of general information is the Official OpenGL Web Site. This Web site contains software, documentation, FAQs, and news.The Reference Manual provides a technical view of how OpenGL operates on data that describes a geometric object or an image to produce an image on the screen. It also contains full descriptions of each set of related OpenGL commands--the parameters used by the commands, the default values for those parameters, and what the commands accomplish. Many OpenGL implementations have this same material online, in the form of manual pages or other help documents, which are probably more up-to-date. There are also versions on the World Wide Web; consult the previously mentioned Official OpenGL Web Site.

OpenGL is really a hardware-independent specification of a programming interface, and you use a particular implementation of it on a particular kind of hardware. This guide explains how to program with any OpenGL implementation. However, since implementations may vary slightly--in performance and in providing additional, optional features, for example--you might want to investigate whether supplementary documentation is available for the particular implementation you're using. In addition, you might have OpenGL-related utilities, toolkits, programming and debugging support, widgets, sample programs, and demos available to you with your system.

This guide contains many sample programs to illustrate the use of particular OpenGL programming techniques. These programs make use of Mark Kilgard's OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT). GLUT is documented in OpenGL Programming for the X Window System by Mark Kilgard (Addison-Wesley, 1996). The section "OpenGL-Related Libraries" in Chapter 1 and Appendix D give more information about using GLUT. If you have access to the Internet, you can obtain the source code for both the sample programs and GLUT for free via anonymous ftp (file-transfer protocol).

For the source code examples found in this book, grab one of these files (depending on which decompression/extraction tools you have):

Use the appropriate tools to uncompress and/or extract the source code from these archive files.Many implementations of OpenGL might also include the code samples as part of the system. This source code is probably the best source for your implementation, because it might have been optimized for your system. Read your machine-specific OpenGL documentation to see where the code samples can be found.

Nate Robins has written a suite of tutorial programs that demonstrate basic OpenGL programming concepts by allowing the user to modify the parameters of a function and interactively see their effects. Topics covered include transformations, lighting, fog, and texturing. These highly recommended tutorials are portable and require the aforementioned GLUT.If you find any bugs, you can use the pointer at this Web site to report them.