In what could be construed as baby steps back to their old Graphics roots, SGI is offering some OpenGL training to students in 2012. It’s a 4.5 day classroom environment that’s supposed to take you from nothing to OpenGL, GLSL, and rendering sufficiency.
Students learn to view and model in 3D, and to create animated, wire frame and solid geometery, under interactive control from input devices. Students add lighting, textures, and other effects to increase realism. New OpenGL 3.0 topics include using vertex buffer objects for better performance and an introduction to the programmable shaders and GLSL for advanced shading techniques using vertex shaders and fragment shaders. This course discusses both the fixed and function pipeline and an introduction to the newer programmable shader pipeline with OpenGL.
While I hope it’s the beginning of a return to graphics, I doubt it. More likely it’s just SGI sponsoring the class in exchange for some advertising and community involvement.
