Courses

OpenGL is the most widely available library for creating interactive computer graphics applications across all of the major computer operating systems. Its uses range from creating applications for scientific visualizations to computer-aided design, interactive gaming and entertainment, and with each new version, its capabilities reveal the most up-to-date features of modern graphics hardware.

This course provides an accelerated introduction to programming OpenGL with an emphasis on the most modern methods for using the library. OpenGL has undergone numerous updates in recent years, which have fundamentally changed how programmers interact with the application programming interface (API) and the skills required for being an effective OpenGL programmer. The most notable of those changes was the introduction of shader-based rendering, which was introduced into the API many years ago, but has recently expanded to subsume almost all functionality in OpenGL. The course summarizes each of the shader stages in OpenGL version 4.0 and methods for specifying data to be used in rendering with OpenGL.

While the annual SIGGRAPH conferences have presented numerous courses on OpenGL over the years, recent revisions to the API, culminating in OpenGL version 4.0, have provided a wealth of new functionality and features that enable creation of ever-richer content. This course builds from demonstrating the use of the most fundamental shader-based OpenGL pipeline to introducing all of the latest shader stages.