CP2060

This page was written by Jon Roberts. I've copied it here (1) so I can pretend like it's mine & take credit (2) because Jon's no longer at JCU, so his website will probably be removed soon. Cheers Jon.

Links for 3D Graphics and OpenGL:

• How to install the GLUT libraries for windows.

News:

• The due date for the assignment is approaching pretty fast, so GET CODING!
  
• Eugene & I both made solutions for the week 5 tute with the robot arm. Here is Eugene's solution. Mine is better, but I'm not going to give you a link to it, because you'll possibly copy it in your assignment. :-)

• Eugene and I have made sure glut is "installed" for Visual C++ 6 (and .NET, but we don't recomment .NET) on the new image.

Links to tutorials and other cool 3D stuff:

• NeHE - Great tutorials
• Lighthouse - more useful tutorials and links
• Nate Robins - Some of the best tutes online (with full source)
• OpenGL Forums - need questions answered?
• Humanoid Animation Standards - a standard for naming and manipulation of 3D humanoid models.
• Some VECTOR MATHS STUFF

Tips:

• Right click "Go To Definition of ..." on any gl, glu or glut function to see list (.h file actually) of all functions in that library & paramters they need. Beats looking it up manually.
• Easiest way to "rotate around" your object/world can be as easy as adding a glRotate(yRot,0,1,0) at the very beginning of your display - therefore rotating your whole world, but leaving your lookAt function (camera) alone.
  
• Have a look at my two cp2060 downloads (downloads section).
• Someone who had done cp2060 gave me some little pieces of advice before I started, and I'm glad they did. You don't want to get too carried away on this project (to the point of failing everything else), but it's nice to end up with a piece of code that your proud of. Not just because your 3d creation looks good, but because the code is good.
• By doing things well the first time, making it clean, using comments, and avoiding spagetti, you'll save time and have a better project by the end. Trust me. You'll also find splitting the project into several files makes it much eaiser as your amout of code increases.
• If you know about object oriented programming, make sure you use them! By having a person class (and think about point and bodyPart class(es) too), you can generate as many people objects as you want. If however, you do everything procedurally from the beginning (eg: having global functions and variables like: personPosX & makePersonMoveAlongX(int _amount)) then its bloody awkward.... it will be VERY hard to re-use and/or change this code later on.
• You probably won't get taught about hierarchial models (ie: trees) until late in the course; by which time it's probably too late to change your code. But if you read up about it early on, you'll find it's actually the best way to represent and draw models. Each body part represents a node, and you traverse through the tree, drawing each part as you go. If your not a strong progammer, you should probably omit this though. It's another one of those things which will be hard to change later on.
• I'd show you my own code if I could, but hey; people would just copy it then. But you can find an executable version on my webpage (in the downloads section). It includes some fragments of code you might find useful (once you start getting good with c++ and glut), including a good piece of code (function) to let you load a bitmap image and use it as a texture, I stole from some poor sod. Having the option to open or save to a file (using the windows open dialog) is also very cool and not many lines of code. It might also help illustrate how classes & trees works (err.... a little).
• I found Lindsay was a really good lecturer. In fact, even people who usually hated teleconferencing enjoyed his lecturers. I got a LOT out of this subject, so hopefully you people will too. :-)