Question

Just learning the basics of OpenGL for a class and was looking for something challenging and interesting to try and draw. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Aiming to photorealism (just plain models, lights, materials, textures, etc.) is one thing, but what is even more interesting in my opinion is demoscene and all kinds of non-photorealistic effects. The idea of a demo is to program some nice animated graphics that automatically change from one effect to another or tell some sort of a story, and have a background music. Here you can find some videos. Just take a look at what some others have done and use your imagination. That’s the funniest part of 3D programming in my opinion. Of course what you’ll first program would be something extremely simple when compared to those videos on youtube, but everyone has to start from somewhere. Simple also doesn’t need to be ugly. Some random suggestions:

• mathematical shapes with sin(), cos(), etc.
• alpha blending, especially addition blending (glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE);)
• terrain rendering
• read 3d model data from a file. (Wavefront .OBJ is a relatively simple one)
• feedback effects with glCopyTexImage2D, which copies pixels from screen to a texture (in real life you shouldn’t use this because it’s too slow, but when learning the basics it’s ok)
• etc…