Horde3D

I know that there are lots of documentation over the internet but it is hard to find really valuable books or web-sites.
So I'd like to ask you to write here the names of the books(web-sites) on opengl that to your mind are the best for studying it(OpenGL).

A lot of people recommend the Red Book, which is pretty much the official documentation.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

thanx, I've just got it.. will be looking at it later..
I've found a nice site, were are pretty good compiled examples on ModelView and Projecting matrices:
http://www.songho.ca/opengl/gl_transform.html
and some tutorials:
http://www.3dcodingtutorial.com/opengl/Working-with-3D-models/

There are plenty books out there, but i personally prefer to just pick a task read something about it and then try to implement it. I personally don't think the red book is very useful for people just starting it's too thick, the nehe tutorials are simple and easy to follow, the API is vast and takes time to learn, so a task based approach that covers what you need is probably best. Books get outdated as soon as they are published, tutorials and forums on the other hand do not.

Hey those sample applications with the matrix and camera views are really useful for people just starting, wish i had something like that when i started. Very cool, bookmarked it to reference it to others in the future

Nice material! Always good to see image representations of what is actually happening from code, especially when it's graphics code. *bookmarks*

Bare in mind Dimedroll that these tutorials on GL_PROJECTION & GL_MODELVIEW are deprecated ways of setting up the rendering view/perspective if you plan to target OpenGL ES 2.0 or OpenGL 3.2 core. Their approach is different where you make uniforms and let the shader do the rest. I'm assuming good documentation is all in-flux as the API is being updated now, there's too much conflicting material for immediate mode/fixed function stuff vs the new way of stuff being programmable on-gpu.

But if you're targetting, say OpenGL 1.5 or OpenGL ES 1.1 then you're fine! I think nvidia said they've made a promise of making sure these API functions will always be supported, not sure about AMD but I'd say they wouldn't want to break any old CAD programs by doing so! The mobile market on the other hand, there's no CAD programs to break there!

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-Alex
Website

You'll have to use all of that if you want to do any vanilla rendering over stuff, such as drawing bounding boxes or manipulators in a toolset window.

Nope, you don't. HUD elements and manipulators need their own shaders, and you just grab the necessary uniform matrices from the scene node you are affecting.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Grant it, 'over stuff' is very grey and makes no indication that it meant "horde finished rendering, now you want to draw some accessory stuff."

Knowing well your graphics API is essential of course. But by far the major part of the knowledge that a graphics programmer needs to have is the almost infinite amount of rendering techniques, algorithms and architectural concepts that are described somewhere. A good start for that is the renowned book Real-Time Rendering (Third Edition). Oh, and then there is of course a massive amount of hardware limitations across the different GPU generations which makes half of the good techniques not suitable for what you want

And still, I say shaders and vertex buffers. Granted, this requires a fair amount of code over what horde provides, but it yields much more reliable results - fixed-function overlays brings my newer GPU down to the single-digits frame rate wise.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

@swiftcoder, I follow you now. (way off topic, I came across your article on spatial hashing, was a good read)

I'd second the recommendation on Real-time rendering. I've found the OpenGL Super Bible too be handy (esp. the 4th edition), and it doesn't read like an RFC.