Week Six: A Nothing Trend

Hey, not much to report.

Amidst interviews, socialising (heaven forbid) and a bastard of a cold, little progress has been made on anything. I concentrated on the Buss book as it launched into averaging and interpolation.

Today I spent a couple of hours working on some of the Buss book problems, because I felt the mathematics was passing in front of my eyes but not attaching itself to my brain. I spent too long on "affine combinations preserve affine transformations" simply because I was thinking in homogeneous co-ordinates and that meant everything looked like linear operators to me.

This, of course, probably means nothing to any reader, even those people that know exactly what affine combinations are. It gives me joy to provide you with such puzzling mysteries.

Week Five: Alternate Views

I think I'm going to be stuck with a lack of programming time for the forseeable future. Interview season has started in earnest and I am just going to have to deal with it.

This hasn't put the brakes on the reading, though. I'm making good progress through the red book, reading all about viewing and colour. Also made some way through the lighting chapter. Still waiting to read about blending, you know...

Buss has now moved onto averaging and interpolation. I started reading the advanced lighting section on the Cook-Torrance model and, although I could have sat down and thrashed it out, I decided it wasn't going to be useful to me Right Now. I may come back later if I decide to play with alternate lighting models.

I'm not sure how one actually uses alternate lighting models at this point, considering that the Phong model is what is built into OpenGL. My current guess is that you have to build it yourself from scratch or perhaps it can be implemented using shading language.

Ah, so much left to discover.

Week Four: Light

I love the Buss book, it keeps giving me a deep-seated understanding of OpenGL. And I love the Red book because it tells me everything I need to know about using OpenGL. Then there's the Nehe tutorials which give me, in your face, no frills code to get stuff happening.

I am doing well at reading but not so good at the practical. I got into the blending tutorial at NeHe at a late hour of the day and my brain was struggling with the idea that you have to tell OpenGL yourself to put render transparent surfaces later. Or something like that. Neither the Red book nor the Buss book cover blending just yet, so I haven't had a full briefing on blending yet.

Another problem is that I am spending a lot of time searching for a job at the moment, writing CVs that sort of thing. Sucks, but part of life's tapestry.

I do, however, understand the basic lighting tools of OpenGL well. I appreciate the difference between ambient and diffuse lighting, diffuse and spectral reflection and also emissive surfaces. All thanks to the Buss book, I have to say. I am having fun, even if I haven't implemented yet.

The longer I go without implementing anything, the more nervous I get, however.

And thanks to Microsoft who have decided to tie Direct3D into the desktop experience, will I ever want to use OpenGL on a Windows platform after Vista?