Way cool, way fast OpenGL rendering techniques

This page collects several links to various OpenGL source code examples and explanations of techniques for "way cool, way fast" OpenGL rendering. OpenGL is the dominate and most powerful 3D graphics API available for hardware accelerated interactive graphics. The techniques below show you how to use OpenGL most effectively for cool effects such as shadows and reflections and textured text. The techniques are very well-suited for 3D gaming. On to the links...

• Fast OpenGL-based "in place" scale & bias technique
• Rendering Fast reflections with OpenGL
• Achieving Quality PostScript output for OpenGL
• Shadows, Lighting, Reflections, and Textures all at Once.
• Rendering a Magic Halo with OpenGL
• A Simple OpenGL-based API for Texture Mapped Text
• Using Sam Leffler's libtiff with OpenGL and GLUT
• Adaptive OpenGL Performance: isfast and pdb - an OpenGL performance database
• Virtualized OpenGL Light Sources for Efficient Multi-Light Source Lighting
• Using paletted textures in OpenGL with MFC
• OpenGL-based Real-Time Shadows
• Multi-pass Texturing in OpenGL for Pseudo-procedural Effects
• OpenGL Projected Textures
• Smooth Normal Generation with Preservation of Edges
• An Application-specific OpenGL Benchmark Harness
• OpenGL-rendering of Underwater Caustics
• OpenGL-rendered patchy planar reflections
• Particle Sytems Rendered as OpenGL Points
• A Brief microUI (MUI) Tutorial (a GLUT-based user interface toolkit)
• Shadow Generation for Realtime Simulation
• Fast OpenGL-rendering of Lens Flares
• Rendering Grids with OpenGL Evaluators

More techniques will be added over time. Many of the examples use the OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT). You can get the GLUT source code distribution (including lots of advanced OpenGL rendering examples) for free. There is also a Win32 version of GLUT available for Windows programmers.

I hope this helps.

Mark Kilgard (mjk@sgi.com)
Silicon Graphics