hot to learn 3d?

[waldronate]

Graphics Gems Repository is a good place to start with the Graphics Gems series. Also check out Real-Time Rendering Resources for a good set of links (and a pretty good book as well). Texturing and Modeling, Third Edition: A Procedural Approach (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics): David S. Ebert, F. Kenton Musgrave, Darwyn Peachey, Ken Perlin, Steve Worley: 9781558608481: Amazon.com: Books is an excellent book on generating content that isn't terribly focused on just graphics basics.

[xoxos]

someone recently directed my attn to shadertoy (coincidentally inigo quilez again) to make a provocative point about coding for browsers. while i'm not even sure what the predominant way of doing that is nowadays (still java, maybe not), it does allow one to make their work available on many platforms.

not for me, i'm old and don't necessarily equate computers and connectivity, perhaps for newer devs it would be ideal for utility applications and establishing a user base.

(shadertoy may be a great way to pick up techniques as iirc many of them are open source... can't get the bloody thing to run in firefox lol)

[waldronate]

Shadertoy is a WebGL toy that provides simple access to the WebGL shaders. It should work on Firefox 17 and later if you have the hardware to support OpenGL ES 2.0 (the base WebGL spec). The shaders run on the hardware, so hardware support is pretty important.

[xoxos]

aah, my chipset is from 2002 which gives me opengl 1.4

[waldronate]

You can always try The Mesa 3D Graphics Library for a software-based version. It'll be slow, but it will probably run. My old GF9400 on the laptop get less than a frame a second on the fancier shaders and fails on some of them...

[Redrobes]

Yeah you need GL2.0 for any chance of using programmable shaders but newer is better naturally. If you need a demo and look at the source code then you can steal my effort. I just did this to see how easy it is. Its not hugely difficult but theres some effort needed to start with and get your head around. The main issue I think is that if it doesnt work its not all that easy to work out why. Its probably easier to get GL going in an app rather than WebGL but then once it works then you can tweak it till it looks right and keep it working.

My WebGL.

Anyway - shows some image texturing, cell shading, and that green glow shader thingy.

[xoxos]

i'm an idiot and and wrote my own libraries 0% gpu acceleration but i pwn every pixel

[waldronate]

The urge to write your own renderer is a powerful one. There are lots of folks out there who have full renderers that run on the GPU. The top-level program loads everything and draws one quad (or two triangles); the shaders programs do everything else.