Week One: Easy Does It

I'll let you into a little secret. I'm not as 3D green as I seem. A year ago, I made some progress with a text exploring the mathematics of 3D graphics, Samuel R. Buss' 3D Computer Graphics... so I at least have a light smearing of 3D knowledge.

For example, I know possessing knowledge of linear algebra - the world of vectors and matrices - is highly important, but I suspect most developers would have, at least, a rudimentary understanding of ths subject. Going further, projective geometry is also important - which I am not so familiar with.

There are wonderous inventions in projective geometry such as homogeneous coordinates that features four coordinates for every three-dimensional point instead of three. They are actually very handy because they allow you, amongst many other things, to write translations (simple linear movements) in matrix form.

I'm just trying to explain that current study feels more like revision... and thus progress is as smooth as a baby's bottom.

I read the first chapter of the Red Book and it was fairly straightforward. It did throw in a stack of OpenGL functions that are alien to me right now, but I know that the authors were just trying to give a flavour of how OpenGL works. I, therefore, forgive them.

I sped through the first four tutorials of NeHe, which puts me ahead of schedule. You work up from creating an empty black window to populating it with a couple of rotating coloured polygons. What a rush; I can already feel I'm on the verge of being able to create Half-Life 3 before Valve.

It is important to not got too bogged down in "how to make your OpenGL window". I am familiar with C++ but not Visual C++ and had never seen #include <windows.h> before in my life. The NeHe tutorials are built using the glaux library, which pushes responsibility for creating windows onto the hapless student; probably not the best way to get cracking on OpenGL code. The OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) simplifies things significantly, but that's besides the point: best to concentrate on controlling content at this early stage, and get into the whole window mastery thing later.

Crawl, walk, run.