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Notes: Introduction to Computer Graphics

by Taylor

4th October, 2015

Notes

Below you will find notes from my Introduction to Computer Graphics course I took as a senior in college. Please feel free to read through these OpenGL notes and shoot me any questions you may have in the comments.

Our Asteroids 3D space ship model built from scratch.

OpenGL stands for Open Graphics Library, and it is a relatively complicated and difficult to learn framework. In my graphics class, we used OpenGL with GLUT, the OpenGL Utility Toolkit.

GLUT is an incredibly powerful library for OpenGL and I highly recommend using it if learning to program with OpenGL. Here is an excerpt from the OpenGL.org website about GLUT,

GLUT (pronounced like the glut in gluttony) is the OpenGL Utility Toolkit, a window system independent toolkit for writing OpenGL programs. It implements a simple windowing application programming interface (API) for OpenGL. GLUT makes it considerably easier to learn about and explore OpenGL programming. GLUT provides a portable API so you can write a single OpenGL program that works across all PC and workstation OS platforms.

GLUT is designed for constructing small to medium sized OpenGL programs. While GLUT is well-suited to learning OpenGL and developing simple OpenGL applications, GLUT is not a full-featured toolkit so large applications requiring sophisticated user interfaces are better off using native window system toolkits. GLUT is simple, easy, and small.

I took this graphics class with my incredibly intelligent and humble Professor Dr. Eric Bachmann at Miami University (OH) in the Fall of 2013. You can find all of the class, lab and lab submission documents below in the “Complete Graphics Collection” section, where I placed all of the documents I saved from the semester. You can also check out the “Graphics Lab Instructions” section which Dr. Bachmann put together and I spent much time working on.

The document below shows some screenshots from my final project in which my friends, Joe Occhionero and Donald Bowers put together. Note that we pulled the slide deck together after a marathon twenty-six hour programming shift, so looking back I can see several (if not many) spelling and grammatical errors. Nevertheless, it’s cool to look back on. I’ll see if I can get a demo up on Youtube or an executable file available for play in the near future.

Note: I did not really use the book provided in this course because Dr. Bachmann’s instructions and notes were so great, but for reference the book of choice for many OpenGL developers is the OpenGL Super Bible (left).

Enjoy!

My Complete Graphics Collection

by Taylor