Lighthouse3d.com

Foundations of Computer Graphics – Online Course at EdX

ARF — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 01:21:50 +0000

A Computer Grahpics course is available at EdX, by Ravi Ramamoorthi, a Professor at UC Berkeley. By the end of the course students should understand the concepts of 3D graphics, and develop programs that create images of a 3D scene with lighting, using both real-time OpenGL and GLSL programming, as well as offline raytracing.

Syllabus:

Overview and Basic Math
Transformations
OpenGL and Lighting
Raytracing

Interactive 3D Graphics – Online Course at Udacity

ARF — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 01:54:56 +0000

Eric Haines (co-author of Real-Time Rendering) is lecturing an online course at Udacity – Interactive 3D Graphics. The course covers the basic principles of 3D computer graphics, including meshes, geometric transformation, camera definition, lighting and materials, and also animation.

Syllabus:

Lesson 1: Introduction - Motivation and a trip down the graphics pipeline, laying out the fundamental processes
Lesson 2: Points, Vectors, and Meshes - The basics of 3D geometry definition
Lesson 3: Colors and Materials - Color representation, material computations, transparency
Lesson 4: Transforms - Translation, scale, rotate and how to properly combine all these
Lesson 5: Matrices - Transform representation and how to fully control these
Lesson 6: Lights and Cameras - Directional and point light sources, and how the camera is defined
Lesson 7: Textures and Reflections - Color and opacity textures, along with reflection and normal mapping
Lesson 8: Shader Programming - An introduction to programming vertex and pixel shaders
Lesson 9: Interaction and Animation - How to select and make objects move

VRML Scritp Tutorial translated to Serbo-Croatian

ARF — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:09:37 +0000

The Lighthouse3D VRML Script Tutorial has been translated to Serbo-Croatian by Anja Skrba from Webhostinggeeks.com. Check it out here.

GLSL Core Tutorial – Texturing with Images plus Querying

ARF — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 17:12:14 +0000

The GLSL Core Tutorial has a new section for image texturing. Images are commonly used as wallpaper applied to 3D shapes to create a variety of effects. In this section we focus on the OpenGL and GLSL typical scenario of texture usage, and explore a few new GLSL functions, such as textureSize, textureQueryLod, and textureQueryLevels.

Planetary Texture Maps (mostly free)

ARF — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 03:05:59 +0000

JHT’s Planetary Pixel Emporium is a site devoted to planetary texture maps. Here you can find hi-res texture maps, bump maps, and normal maps, for all the planets in the solar system as well as some moons. Most of these are free to download, read the copyright info if you intent to use them.

GLSL Core Tutorial Update – Playing with Texture Coordinates

ARF — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 04:33:06 +0000

Based only on texture coordinates some interesting shaders can be built. In this new section of the GLSL Core Tutorial, a few common shaders, namely the stripes and grid shaders, will be explored. Basic antialising and GLSL functions mix and smoothstep will also be discussed. Source code and a VS2010 solution are also provided.

Free Online Books

ARF — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 23:21:13 +0000

Here goes a list of links to freely available books online:

OpenGL Shading Language (2nd edition) – old syntax, but still worth a visit.
AI Game Development
Algorithms in Game Programming
Game Programming Gurus

Common 3D Models in Research Papers

ARF — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 03:12:58 +0000

Morgan McGuire makes available a collection of Meshes that are common in recent papers. Most meshes are available in OBJ format.

The Brown Mesh Set, also by McGuire, provides a huge collection (1139) of older models. These models are in IFS format. Sample source code to read them is provided in the G3D engine.

The Large Geometric Models Archive provides the iconic Stanford Bunny, a large (+4 million vertices) skeleton model, and terrain data for the Grand Canyon and Puget Sound areas.

Loading an Image File and Creating a Texture

ARF — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 03:06:31 +0000

OpenGL, unlike Direct3D, is operating system independent. While this eases the portability among different OS, it implies that we have to resort to external libraries for a number of tasks, loading images being one of the most used.

There are many libraries to load images, DevIL being one of them. It loads a large number of image formats and it is cross platform.

A short tutorial for loading an image, getting its data and attributes, and finally creating an OpenGL texture is available in here.

Notepad++ GLSL 4.3 Syntax Highlight

ARF — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 03:35:28 +0000

Notepad++ is a great text editor and I keep using over and over. I found some GLSL syntax highlight UDL files in the site but they were not up to date and most importantly they we’re not prepared to work with dark themes. So I made two UDLs for GLSL 4.3. One for the default theme and another to use with dark themes. The extensions supported are: vert frag geom tesc tese v f g.

The zip file contains both. To install the themes go to “Language”->”Define your language”. In the “User Defined Language” dialog select import to load the files into notepad++.

Here are some screenshots. Light version with default theme:

Dark version with Monokai theme: