Creating Your First OpenGL Scene: Drawing Primitives in C++
OpenGL is a powerful tool for creating 2D and 3D graphics. If you’ve recently set up your OpenGL environment and are eager to create your first scene, you’re in the right place. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of drawing basic geometric primitives — triangles, squares, and circles — in C++. This tutorial will focus on using the fixed-function pipeline, so there’s no need to worry about shaders for now.
Why Start with Primitives?
Geometric primitives like triangles, squares, and circles are the building blocks of more complex shapes and objects in OpenGL. Understanding how to draw and manipulate these basic shapes is a crucial step in learning OpenGL. Once you master these, you’ll be well-equipped to move on to more advanced topics like 3D rendering and transformations.
Setting Up Your Project
Before we dive into coding, ensure that your development environment is set up correctly. You’ll need OpenGL along with a windowing toolkit like GLUT to create and manage windows. If you haven’t set this up yet, refer to my previous post on setting up OpenGL in MS Visual Studio 2022.
