Product Description

OpenGL^® Programming Guide, Sixth Edition

OpenGL is a powerful software interface used to produce high-quality, computergenerated images and interactive applications using 2D and 3D objects, bitmaps, and color images.

The OpenGL^® Programming Guide, Sixth Edition, provides definitive and comprehensive information on OpenGL and the OpenGL Utility Library. The previous edition covered OpenGL through Version 2.0. This sixth edition of the best-selling "red book" describes the latest features of OpenGL Version 2.1. You will find clear explanations of OpenGL functionality and many basic computer graphics techniques, such as building and rendering 3D models; interactively viewing objects from different perspective points; and using shading, lighting, and texturing effects for greater realism. In addition, this book provides in-depth coverage of advanced techniques, including texture mapping, antialiasing, fog and atmospheric effects, NURBS, image processing, and more. The text also explores other key topics such as enhancing performance, OpenGL extensions, and cross-platform techniques.

This sixth edition has been updated to include the newest features of OpenGL Version 2.1, including:

• Using server-side pixel buffer objects for fast pixel rectangle download and retrieval
• Discussion of the sRGB texture format
• Expanded discussion of the OpenGL Shading Language

This edition continues the discussion of the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) and explains the mechanics of using this language to create complex graphics effects and boost the computational power of OpenGL.

The OpenGL Technical Library provides tutorial and reference books for OpenGL. The Library enables programmers to gain a practical understanding of OpenGL and shows them how to unlock its full potential. Originally developed by SGI, the Library continues to evolve under the auspices of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) Steering Group (now part of the Khronos Group), an industry consortium responsible for guiding the evolution of OpenGL and related technologies.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #315197 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 928 pages

About the Author

Dave Shreiner, a computer graphics specialist at ARM, Inc., was a longtime member of the core OpenGL team at SGI. He authored the first commercial OpenGL training course, and has been developing computer graphics applications for more than two decades. Dave regularly presents at SIGGRAPH and other conferences worldwide, and is coauthor of the OpenGL^® Reference Manual (Addison-Wesley).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

What This Guide Contains

This guide has 15 chapters. The first five chapters present basic informationthat you need to understand to be able to draw a properly colored and litthree-dimensional object on the screen.

• Chapter 1, "Introduction to OpenGL," provides a glimpse into the kinds of things OpenGL can do. It also presents a simple OpenGL program and explains essential programming details you need to know for subsequent chapters.
• Chapter 2, "State Management and Drawing Geometric Objects," explains how to create a three-dimensional geometric description of an object that is eventually drawn on the screen.
• Chapter 3, "Viewing," describes how such three-dimensional models are transformed before being drawn on a two-dimensional screen. You can control these transformations to show a particular view of a model.
• Chapter 4, "Color," describes how to specify the color and shading method used to draw an object.
• Chapter 5, "Lighting," explains how to control the lighting conditions surrounding an object and how that object responds to light (that is, how it reflects or absorbs light). Lighting is an important topic, since objects usually don't look three-dimensional until they're lit.

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.

• Chapter 6, "Blending, Antialiasing, Fog, and Polygon Offset," describes techniques essential to creating a realistic scene--alpha blending (to create transparent objects), antialiasing (to eliminate jagged edges), atmospheric effects (to simulate fog or smog), and polygon offset (to remove visual artifacts when highlighting the edges of filled polygons).
• Chapter 7, "Display Lists," discusses how to store a series of OpenGL commands for execution at a later time. You'll want to use this feature to increase the performance of your OpenGL program.
• Chapter 8, "Drawing Pixels, Bitmaps, Fonts, and Images," discusses how to work with sets of two-dimensional data as bitmaps or images. One typical use for bitmaps is describing characters in fonts.
• Chapter 9, "Texture Mapping," explains how to map one-, two-, and three-dimensional images called textures onto three-dimensional objects. Many marvelous effects can be achieved through texture mapping.
• Chapter 10, "The Framebuffer," describes all the possible buffers that can exist in an OpenGL implementation and how you can control them. You can use the buffers for such effects as hidden-surface elimination, stenciling, masking, motion blur, and depth-of-field focusing.
• Chapter 11, "Tessellators and Quadrics," shows how to use the tessellation and quadrics routines in the GLU (OpenGL Utility Library).
• Chapter 12, "Evaluators and NURBS," gives an introduction to advanced techniques for efficient generation of curves or surfaces.
• Chapter 13, "Selection and Feedback," explains how you can use OpenGL's selection mechanism to select an object on the screen. Additionally, the chapter explains the feedback mechanism, which allows you to collect the drawing information OpenGL produces, rather than having it be used to draw on the screen.
• Chapter 14, "Now That You Know," describes how to use OpenGL in several clever and unexpected ways to produce interesting results. These techniques are drawn from years of experience with both OpenGL and the technological precursor to OpenGL, the Silicon Graphics IRIS Graphics Library.
• Chapter 15, "The OpenGL Shading Language," discusses the changes that occurred starting with OpenGL Version 2.0. This includes an introduction to the OpenGL Shading Language, also commonly called the "GLSL," which allows you to take control of portions of OpenGL's processing for vertices and fragments. This functionality can greatly enhance the image quality and computational power of OpenGL.

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

• Appendix A, "Order of Operations," gives a technical overview of the operations OpenGL performs, briefly describing them in the order in which they occur as an application executes.
• Appendix B, "State Variables," lists the state variables that OpenGL maintains and describes how to obtain their values.
• Appendix C, "OpenGL and Window Systems," briefly describes the routines available in window-system-specific libraries, which are extended to support OpenGL rendering. Window system interfaces to the X Window System, Apple's Mac/OS, IBM OS/2, and Microsoft Windows are discussed here.
• Appendix D, "Basics of GLUT: The OpenGL Utility Toolkit," discusses the library that handles window system operations. GLUT is portable and it makes code examples shorter and more comprehensible.
• Appendix E, "Calculating Normal Vectors," tells you how to calculate normal vectors for different types of geometric objects.
• Appendix F, "Homogeneous Coordinates and Transformation Matrices," explains some of the mathematics behind matrix transformations.
• Appendix G, "Programming Tips," lists some programming tips based on the intentions of the designers of OpenGL that you might find useful.
• Appendix H, "OpenGL Invariance," describes when and where an OpenGL implementation must generate the exact pixel values described in the OpenGL specification.
• Appendix I, "Built-In OpenGL Shading Language Variables and Functions," lists all of the built-in variables and functions available in the OpenGL Shading Language.

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

What's New in This Edition

The sixth edition of the OpenGL Programming Guide includes new andupdated material covering OpenGL Version 2.1:

• Coverage of the following new core capabilities has been added:
- Storage of pixel rectangles in buffer objects.
- Support for sRGB formatted textures. The sRGB color space roughly corresponds to a gamma-corrected RGB space (using a gamma value of 2.2).
- Specification of nonsquare matrices as uniform variables in OpenGL shading language shader programs.
- Expanded discussion of the OpenGL shading language, including additions supporting OpenGL Version 2.1 functionality.
• Bug fixes and other clarifications

What You Should Know Before Reading This Guide

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:

• Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by James D. Foley, Andries van Dam, Steven K. Feiner, and John F. Hughes (Addison-Wesley, 1990)--This book is an encyclopedic treatment of the subject of computer graphics. It includes a wealth of information but is probably best read after you have some experience with the subject.
• 3D Computer Graphics by Andrew S. Glassner (The Lyons Press, 1994)--This book is a nontechnical, gentle introduction to computer graphics. It focuses on the visual effects that can be achieved, rather than on the techniques needed to achieve them.

Another great place for all sorts of general information is the Official OpenGL Web Site. This Web site contains software, sample programs, documentation, FAQs, discussion boards, and news. It is always a good place to start any search for answers to your OpenGL questions:

http://www.opengl.org/

Additionally, full documentation of all the procedures that compose OpenGL Version 2.1 are documented at the Official OpenGL Web site. These Web pages replace the OpenGL Reference Manual that was published by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board and Addison-Wesley.

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.

How to Obtain the Sample Code

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...

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Customer Reviews

Good collection
It is a great collection of material available on the internet, but well organised and will save time.

an Historical text
Don't buy this book. It is simply an accumulation and rehash of all the previous versions lacking the grace of somebody editing out things that have become, to all practical purposes, obsolete.

It will have you believe that certain features of OpenGL are alive and well, when in fact they are archaic, and have been replaced by new facilities in the language. This is not a book that will assist a beginner, it may be of use to a technical historian.

As an example, extensive sample code is provided to illustrate gluBuild2DMipmaps() but no code is provided for the more uptodate GL_GENERATE_MIPMAPS and there is no explanation of it's use with borders...

If you are beginning OpenGL look elsewhere.

Excellent Reference
Though you can probably find most of the content in this book on the internet, the OpenGL Programmer's Guide is a great reference when programming using opengl. It has easily understandable explanations for every function, as well as many great examples. When I need to use a refernce to see if there are any functions that suit my needs, I can usually find them faster in this book than through google.