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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.
via HPC Training – OpenGL Programming.
Science education, opengl, sgi
If you’ve been keeping up with OpenGL 4.x, then you’ve no doubt heard of the new Tessellation features they’ve added. Available in DirectX for a few versions now, it’s finally come to OpenGL and offers up some great new features for automatic tessellation and geometry processing. A new tutorial online shows some example code and techniques behind the new systems, and offers up lots of details along the way.
Let’s take a look at how Tessellation has been implemented in the graphics pipeline. The core components that are responsible for Tessellation are two new shader stages and in between them a fixed function stage that can be configured to some degree but does not run a shader. The first shader stage is called Tessellation Control Shader (TCS), the fixed function stage is called the Primitive Generator (PG), and the second shader stage is called Tessellation Evaluation Shader (TES).
They show lots of code but also get into the details of barycentric coordinates, displacement maps, textured surfaces, and much more. Get it all at the link below.
via Tutorial 30: Basic Tessellation
Science opengl, tutorial
Christophe Riccio has published a nice review of the new OpenGL4.2 on Google Docs, covering all the new features and even showing off some results. I particularly like his in-depth coverage of the new texture compression formats, complete with some included images showing the differences.
It’s available via the Google Docs link below, where you can conveniently download it as a PDF.
OpenGL 4.2 review – Google Docs.
Science opengl, review
Another stop you may want to make at SIGGRAPH is by the Khronos BOF where they’ll be discussing their newly released OpenGL4.2 specification. Some of the new features include:
- enabling shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture. These capabilities can be combined, for example, to maintain a counter at each pixel in a buffer object for single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency;
- capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback to enable complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated;
- modifying an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for significant performance improvements;
- packing multiple 8 and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced memory storage and bandwidth, especially useful when transferring data between shader stages.
The press release also has comments from both NVidia and AMD discussing their upcoming OpenGL4.2 compatible drivers. NVidia’s drivers are available today, but it seems AMD’s aren’t available quite yet. They mentioned having 4.2 Beta drivers available “with the publication of the OpenGL4.2 specification”, but they dont’ seem to be available yet.
via Khronos Enriches Cross-Platform 3D Graphics with Release of OpenGL 4.2 Specification – Khronos Group Press Release.
Science khronos, opengl
The next chapter of the OpenGLBook.com is now online, focusing on rendering and geometry in 3-dimensions with OpenGL.
If you’re learning OpenGL, it’s very likely you’re doing so to learn how to render three-dimensional data. In this chapter, we’ll be placing our very first step in the world of three-dimensional computer graphics. We’ll learn:
- The mathematics used to describe transformations in a three-dimensional world
- What coordinate systems are good for and how to use them
- What polygon culling is and why it’s used
- How to render a rotating colored cube to the screen
- Some new OpenGL function calls
As mentioned in the preface, you’ll need some mathematical knowledge in order to understand some of the concepts presented, preferably knowledge of linear algebra. The mathematics in this chapter is as lightweight as possible without sacrificing the integrity of the presented concept.
The entire “book” looks like a great resource for folks getting into computer graphics, and might even make a decent course textbook for an intro-level course.
via Chapter 4: Entering the Third Dimension | OpenGLBook.com.
Graphics, Science book, education, opengl
Now here’s something I didn’t expect. SGI is preparing an OpenGL Training Course over in California where students get a nice 5-day course on OpenGL, GLEW, and GLSL.
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.
I find it ironic and humorous that the company that was sadly always one step behind is now offering a “cutting edge training class” on OpenGL3, rather than the current OpenGL4. Nonetheless, looks like a great course covering a wide variety of topics.
via HPC Training – OpenGL Programming.
Science education, opengl, sgi
If you know OpenGL and you’ve always wanted to see your name listed as an “Author”, then consider heading on over to the OpenGL Insights page where they’re looking for Authors for a wide range of subjects.
Given the wide array of OpenGL platforms, from Mac desktops to Android phones to web browsers, we invite you to submit article proposals on all aspects of OpenGL development, including performance tuning, recent GL features/extensions, application architecture, vendor-specific techniques, WebGL, and interoperability with other APIs. We are interested in proposals based on your unique real-world experience using OpenGL.
Proposals for chapters are due by August 15th.
OpenGL Insights.
Science book, opengl
John Carmack, long time creator of such gamign classics as Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, dropped a bombshell on the graphics community in an interview with bit-tech where the announced his newly found favor for Direct3D over OpenGL.
Speaking to bit-tech for a forthcoming Custom PC feature about the future of OpenGL in PC gaming, Carmack said ‘I actually think that Direct3D is a rather better API today.’ He also added that ‘Microsoft had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns. Direct3D handles multi-threading better, and newer versions manage state better.’
Carmack has long been a supporter of OpenGL, using it in most of his games and being somewhat of a champion for cross-platform gaming in the process (Fat chance getting DirectX games on Linux, for example).
via Carmack: Direct3D is now better than OpenGL | bit-gamer.net.
Graphics, Science carmack, directx, opengl
Equalizer, the somewhat next-generation of the massive tiled display system Chromium, has just hit version 1.0 alpha and added a nice API and SDK system called ‘Collage’.
The most notable new features in this release are:
- Full feature set and API of Equalizer 1.0
- GPU compression plugins
- Failure tolerance during initialization
- Administrative API for runtime configuration changes (preview)
Intended primarily for application developers, it’s a great API for creating massively parallel OpenGL applications.
via Equalizer: News: Equalizer 1.0-alpha delivers scalability and flexibility for OpenGL applications.
Science equalizer, opengl, sdk
A great article in The Linux Journal discusses the creation of an OpenGL-based Image Processing system that can analyze video captured from an attached camera in real-time.
This article discusses using OpenGL shaders to perform image processing. The images are obtained from a device using the Video4Linux 2 (V4L2) interface. Using horsepower from the graphics card to do some of the image processing reduces the load on the CPU and may result in better throughput. The article describes the Glutcam program, which I developed, and the pieces behind it.
In the end, he has it running a single edge-detection kernel, but it could easily be modified to do much much more.
via Image Processing with OpenGL and Shaders | Linux Journal.
Science howto, imageprocessing, opengl, tutorial
VizWorld.com 
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