Hi Rick,
We are looking for text book kinds of materials. Do you have
recommendations in that regard, perhaps something you and Bob have
already written? Like I mentioned, I would really like to start off
with OpenGL and then show how OSG helps.
Hehe, you do know that Paul wrote OpenGL Distilled, don't you? Without a
doubt, one of the best OpenGL books around. Along with the Red and
Orange books, every OpenGL developer should have it. For a course, I
would say you only need that one, and let the really interested students
get the others if they want to continue down that path.
For a more general CG reference I would highly recommend Real-Time
Rendering (now at 3rd edition) by Tomas Akenine-Möller, Eric Haines and
Naty Hoffman. I've said it before on this list, this book is a
must-have. Its breadth is astonishing (it covers almost any CG topic
short of the really really advanced stuff) and when you need to go more
in-depth on a given subject, it has a ton of references to point you in
the right direction. (side note: on their site
http://www.realtimerendering.com/ there are PowerPoint slides for a
course, you could use that for inspiration if you want)
Not sure you can tell all your students to buy two textbooks for a
class, but those are the two I would suggest: OpenGL Distilled and
Real-Time Rendering. Perhaps you can pair the students and get each pair
to get the two books (one per student) so they can benefit from both
without buying both.
Anyways, good luck with the class. I agree with Simon: get them hooked
with some nice visual results (games like TF2, Crysis, Mass Effect, etc.
and perhaps some demos - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene) and
then when they're really interested in the pretty pictures you can start
teaching them how it's done.
One really important part is showing them early what the difference is
between a pre-rendered animation and real-time stuff. That way they can
appreciate the amount of work that goes into making things look that
good even though it's real-time, and how you need to be ingenious to
develop tricks and cheats in order to make it look like you're doing
things that should be impossible to do in real-time. IMHO, that's the
best part of what we do.
J-S
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______________________________________________________
Jean-Sebastien Guay [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.cm-labs.com/
http://whitestar02.webhop.org/
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