Creating Cool OpenGL Demos for Open Day

Seminar

Nick Lowe (nickl'at'csse.uwa.edu.au)

This seminar was the first of a new format we decided to try out. Basically, presentation-heavy seminars take a while to put together and we don't have enough time to dedicate to them. So we decided to try giving a few "snapshot" style seminars. We present something that we have done recently that may be of interest to other people. We make sure to show all the important bits from conception to completion. Importantly, we share all this knowledge in a very raw manner: if we drew a plan, we draw a plan; if we coded stuff, we code stuff; etc. Then at the end we show Jackie Chan style outtakes - what went wrong!

So here are the files from the workshop:

Below is the original notice:

Another seminar next Friday [03/09/2003] Nick

Quick Details:

Learn how to make images like this!:

After the great response to the previous seminar and workshop we decided that we would really like to continue offering seminars to help people learn about real-time rendering. However we are quite busy with "real" work,so we have decided to offer more casual seminars. We'll see how the response is and decide whether or not to start with every-now-and-then informal seminars for anyone interested.

Our next seminar will be in two stages:

  1. A repeat of the first seminar for those who missed out (An Introduction to OpenGL)
  2. A "walk-through" of how we created the demos we showed at Open Day
We think that the greatest barrier to getting into real-time graphics programming is the first hurdle. There are a lot of questions people seem a little embarassed to ask, but need to be asked before you can start doing anything in OpenGL: "How do I use call OpenGL functions? What files to I include?". Then there are also questions that people may find difficult to get straight answers to: "How do I efficiently triangulate and render a mesh?". In the second stage of the seminar we'll basically create a demo from scratch. In-so-doing, we hope to answer a few of these questions. We'll start with a basic OpenGL application (just a window) and create a makefile. Then we'll keep adding functionality until we have it rendering what we want (an animated spherical harmonic). Then we'll optimise it using triangle strips. At each stage we'll go over our reasoning (with sketchs on the whiteboard if necessary) and answer questions.

So, (now for the tag-line) if you want to know how we make a basic OpenGL application that renders the images on this page, come to our seminar next Friday!