Introduction to OpenGL Graphics Programming

Last Updated 12/21/12

OpenGL is a powerful cross platform graphics API. With OpenGL, you can get hardware accelerated 2D and 3D rendering. This tutorial set was made to give beginners a head start by going through the basics of OpenGL usage.

For this tutorial we'll be starting using the OpenGL 2.1 era code to get started with the basics. Then we'll transition to modern OpenGL 3.0+ shader based programs.

Make sure to check out the Frequently Asked OpenGL Tutorial Questions. If you're having trouble with vector math, check out my OpenGL Math Primer.

Table of Contents
Introduction	We'll be talking about what these tutorials will cover and what they're designed to do.
Lesson 01 Hello OpenGL	Here we set up an OpenGL window using freeGLUT and render a quad to the screen.
Lesson 02 Matrices and Coloring Polygons	Here we learn how to set up our rendering coordinates and give color to our polygons. We'll also go over the very basics of how a GPU pipeline works.
Lesson 03 The Viewport	Here we learn how to control where on our screen we want OpenGL to render using the viewport.
Lesson 04 Scrolling and the Matrix Stack	In many if not most games, the game environments are larger than one screen. Here we'll learn to scroll through large environments.
Lesson 05 Texture Mapping and Pixel Manipulation	If you want to do 2D images in OpenGL, you want to use textured quads. Here we'll apply a checkerboard texture to our geometry.
Lesson 06 Loading a Texture	We created a texture from memory, now we'll load a texture from a file using DevIL.
Lesson 07 Clipping Textures	Often times multiple images are put onto one texture. Here we'll render a part of a texture.
Lesson 08 Non-Power-of-Two Textures	Here we'll render an image that doesn't have power of two dimensions.
Lesson 09 Updating Textures	Here we'll update a texture's pixels after creating it.
Lesson 10 Color Keying and Blending	In this lesson we'll give our image a transparent background and blend our image with the background.
Lesson 11 Stretching and Filters	Here we'll learn to stretch our texture to different sizes.
Lesson 12 Rotation	In this lesson, we'll make a texture rotate to make it spin.
Lesson 13 Matrix Transformations	Here we'll learn better way to stretch and rotate our textured quads using matrices.
Lesson 14 Repeating Textures	Here we'll show the same texture multiple times on the same quad.
Lesson 15 Extensions and GLEW	Here we'll get the latest OpenGL functionality using GLEW to get the OpenGL extensions.
Lesson 16 Vertex Arrays	Here we'll send vertex data to the GPU in sets instead of one by one using vertex arrays.
Lesson 17 Vertex Buffer Objects	In this tutorial, we'll store our vertex data on the GPU for drawing.
Lesson 18 Textured Vertex Buffers	Here we'll render our textured quad as a VBO.
Lesson 19 Sprite Sheets	Here we'll preallocate our vertex/index data for all of our sprites.
Lesson 20 Bitmap Fonts	Bitmap fonts are a basic way to render text to the screen.
Lesson 21 Alpha Textures	Up until now we've always used 32bit RGBA textures. In this tutorial we'll make a special type of texture that only has an alpha component.
Lesson 22 Texture Blitting and Texture Padding	Time to do some more advanced pixel manipulation to copy textures and manually pad them.
Lesson 23 FreeType Fonts	Here we'll render text using a True Type font.
Lesson 24 Text Alignment	Learn how to align your text to the top/bottom/left/right of whatever area you define.
Lesson 25 Transforming Text	Here we'll apply matrix transformations to text.
Lesson 26 The Stencil Buffer	Using the stencil buffer, you can define the portions of the screen you want to render to with geometry.
Lesson 27 Frame Buffer Objects and Render to Texture	Using frame buffer objects, you can render off screen. Here, we're going to render to an off screen frame buffer to render to a texture.
Lesson 28 Antialiasing and Multisampling	Tired of jaggies on your polygons? Using antialiasing and multisampling you can smooth out those edges.
Lesson 29 Hello GLSL	Modern OpenGL does its graphics operations with programmable pipelines. This tutorial will get you started with your first GLSL shader program.
Lesson 30 Loading Text File Shaders	Why recompile code you don't have to? In this tutorial we'll be loading our GLSL shader source code from an external file.
Lesson 31 GLSL Matrices, Color, and Uniforms	In this tutorial we'll be interfacing our OpenGL application with our shader programs using uniforms.
Lesson 32 GLM Matrices	We'll be using the GL Math library to help with matrix operations for modern OpenGL applications.
Lesson 33 Multi-Color Polygons and Attributes	Using attributes we can have custom per-vertex variables in our shader to draw a polygon with per-vertex coloring.
Lesson 34 GLSL Texturing	We'll finally use textures in our GLSL shader programs.
Lesson 35 GLSL Font	We'll be using a GLSL shader program to render fonts.
Lesson 36 Vertex Array Objects	We'll be binding all our vertex attributes to a single vertex array object.
Conclusion	Here's some additional tips to continue learning OpenGL.

I am not claiming to know everything there is to know about programming/C++/OpenGL, but I have gained knowledge from the OpenGL projects I've worked on. These tutorials are made to pass on the knowledge I gained to those just starting out and to make OpenGL much less intimidating to beginners. I try to keep my code and tutorials as bug free as possible. If you find any errors please report them to me. Suggestions are also welcome.

So if you have any suggestions, comments, questions, bugs reports, typos, or anything else you want to say about the tutorials, feel free to contact me.

Lazy Foo' Productions

Introduction to OpenGL Graphics Programming

Last Updated 12/21/12

Copyright Lazy Foo' Productions 2004-2013