glsdk-devel

[Glsdk-devel] Tutorial series

[Branan R. <br...@gm...>]

OK, it's time to start thinking about the tutorials, an how they
should be implemented.

The biggest issue I see is with the large amount of "stuff" that has
to be taught before a working application can be created. At a
minimum, context creation, vertex buffers, and shaders need to be
taught all at once. After that, there are a number of options. I think
3D transformations needs to be covered early, followed by texturing
and then off-screen rendering (FBOs). I also think we should have
tutorials on GLX, WGL, and whatever the Mac OS X interface to OpenGL
is called.

I'm not sure if we should include tutorials on various techniques or
not - there are many different lighting equations, should be include a
tutorial on Lighting, or leave that to the outside world?


Here's my proposed progression so far:
Tutorial 0: Introduction to OpenGL, introduction to the boilerplate code
Tutorial 1: Buffer Objects, Shaders, Projection matrices (can just be
mentioned, doesn't need to be explained)
Tutorial 2: Rotation, Translation, Scaling
Tutorial 3: Texturing
Tutorial 4: FBOs and Offscreen Rendering

Tutorial A: GLX
Tutorial B: WGL
Tutorial C: OSX


Branan

Re: [Glsdk-devel] Tutorial series

[<gl...@mo...>]

> The biggest issue I see is with the large amount of "stuff" that has
> to be taught before a working application can be created.

We have shape library. If we had shader library (we need just one shader
at first), then we could leave teaching shaders and buffer objects for
later, and focus on translation, rotation and projection at first. Just
tell the user to load one of predefined shaders and don't bother for now.

Then we could introduce buffer objects, which will allow creating custom
shapes, but still with predefined shaders.

Finally custome shaders would be introduced.

> I'm not sure if we should include tutorials on various techniques or
> not - there are many different lighting equations, should be include a
> tutorial on Lighting, or leave that to the outside world?

I think lighting tutorials should be included.
I think lighting is what shader tutorials should actually start from (we
would do no lighting up to this point, just coloured polygons).
How about this list of lighting shaders:
-pass a color and interpolate it
-directional, unattenuaded diffuse lighting
-point light, diffuse only
-point light, diffuse + specular
-spot light, diffuse + specular
-shader with two lights (directional + interactive controlled spotlight +
a few moving objects in the scene)

All lighting tutorials would use some ambient or emissive lighting.
Then we could go to texturing.


By the way - it would be good if we had following objects in shape library:
-"spotlight" (I propose a flashlight, since it visualises direction nicely)
-"pointlight" (a lightbulb?)
-flat arrow
-3D arrow

I could make models with Blender and convert to .c files if necessary.