Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By : Muhammad Mobeen Movania
Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By: Muhammad Mobeen Movania

Overview of this book

OpenGL is the leading cross-language, multi-platform API used by masses of modern games and applications in a vast array of different sectors. Developing graphics with OpenGL lets you harness the increasing power of GPUs and really take your visuals to the next level. OpenGL Development Cookbook is your guide to graphical programming techniques to implement 3D mesh formats and skeletal animation to learn and understand OpenGL. OpenGL Development Cookbook introduces you to the modern OpenGL. Beginning with vertex-based deformations, common mesh formats, and skeletal animation with GPU skinning, and going on to demonstrate different shader stages in the graphics pipeline. OpenGL Development Cookbook focuses on providing you with practical examples on complex topics, such as variance shadow mapping, GPU-based paths, and ray tracing. By the end you will be familiar with the latest advanced GPU-based volume rendering techniques.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
OpenGL Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


In this chapter, we will look at the recipes for handling 3D viewing tasks and object picking in OpenGL v3.3 and above. All of the real-time simulations, games, and other graphics applications require a virtual camera or a virtual viewer from the point of view of which the 3D scene is rendered. The virtual camera is itself placed in the 3D world and has a specific direction called the camera look direction. Internally, the virtual camera is itself a collection of translations and rotations, which is stored inside the viewing matrix.

Moreover, projection settings for the virtual camera control how big or small the objects appear on screen. This is the kind of functionality which is controlled through the real world camera lens. These are controlled through the projection matrix. In addition to specifying the viewing and projection matrices, the virtual camera may also help with reducing the amount of geometry pushed to the GPU. This is through a process called view frustum culling...