Im looking for the best book that i can find that will teach me how to do advanced rendering and possibly help refine my basic opengl knowledge. im mainly looking into advanced rendering like dynamic shadows, relflections, and normal mapping. i have looked all over google and have had very little luck with good tutorials. right now the Cg Tutorials is looking like a good book because i have a geforce4 ti. the only prob i have is does it teach with Visual C++ or not? i would prefer it to teach in VC++. are there any REALLY good opengl books out there? im looking for somethin below $100 and if you know of one that is more than that then tell me why. i dont want to go out and just waste my money.

Look at "Real-Time Rendering 2nd Edition". This will give the concepts but not the code. For the code, I use:

1. Red Book
2. OpenGL Spec 1.4
3. Google (msdn/sgi)
4. nehe
and I''m just looking at the Cg material now (own an ATI card, but I can still do ARB).

Basically, if you''re to the point where you''re reachign those topics, the best material is that which you will find online.

-B

Well there are two books I strongly recommend to anyone who has a good handle of the basics of OpenGL, and wants to delve into the higher end stuff.

The first is "Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics". This book, as the name suggests, covers a fair spread of mathematical topics that relate directly to programming in a 3D environment. I really consider this book a must have. If you want to do anything fancy, you need to know the maths behind it. You''ll find most of the advanced techniques you''re interested in are 90% math 10% implementation. This book is farly advanced, but being that it is quite authoritive and complete. All the code examples are given in the context of OpenGL too.

The second one is "3D Game Engine Design". Whereas the other book focused on the theory, this book is focused on the implementation. It covers some very important topics in areas of organisation and structure that are not covered in the first book, as well as giving more examples of how to apply the maths to create the effects you''re after. It also has two very detailed chapters on surfaces and curves, which are not really discussed in very much depth in the first book. Because of the focus on methods of implementation however, they sometimes skip over the math quite quickly. You do not want to get this book unless you get the first one, or else you''ll just end up with a lot of headaches.


If you''re serious about learning this stuff, I really think you need to get these two books (IMO anyway). The second one can wait, since the first one takes a fair while to work through by itself, and you really need to do at least the first three chapters before even opening the second one.