reigenatk / opengl-crap

Learnin OpenGL for fun

Yet Another Github repo by reigenatk

I'm working through this awesome resource. Had enough of not understanding the first thing about graphics. Too impatient to wait for a class at my school that teachers this subject matter (although all the notes are available online anyways lol). So I'm taking it into my own hands again :P

The motivation? Graphics is super important to understand, and it has lots of importance to game developers (a field I am interested in). Often times people will write custom shaders to make really cool visual effects. Also I've always heard tons of buzzwords thrown around, and I'm tired of not knowing what they mean. Things like "textures", "shaders", "DirectX", "Vulkan", "OpenGL", "anti-aliasing", "bloom", "ambient occlusion", "frag/vertex shaders". And finally, I recently went down the 3DCG rabithole, making a few things in Blender, and it just blew my mind how you can literally make anything in that program. So I'm curious how its programmed beneath the hood

Another huge motivation was, I played this game called Stray, and it blew my mind. First of all it's probably my new favorite game ever, I highly recommend it. But anyways it was made in UE4, which is one of the most powerful 3D rendering tools right now. And so I got curious- How is it possible to render such realistic scenes using code? Because whatever it is, I wanna know. Graphics are getting freakishly good and I'm tired of being OOTL. And with UE5 coming up I'm sure it'll only get better and better.

I went with OpenGL because its the oldest of the graphics standards and seems the easiest to get into (it seems to be the Python of graphics, a good starting point?) and I figured the skills would transfer to newer standards. Hopefully by the end of this I'll have a nice video I can put together, showing some of the stuff that I the author of the book but I really just copied and tweaked a bit made.