Understanding OpenGL through Python
Introduction
Following this article by Muhammad Junaid Khalid, where basic OpenGL concepts and setup was explained, now we’ll be looking at how to make more complex objects and how to animate them.
OpenGL is very old, and you won’t find many tutorials online on how to properly use it and understand it because all the top dogs are already knee-deep in new technologies.
To understand modern OpenGL code, you have to first understand the ancient concepts that were written on stone tablets by the wise Mayan game developers.
In this article, we’ll jump into several fundamental topics you’ll need to know:
In the last section we’ll take a look at how to actually use OpenGL with the Python libraries PyGame and PyOpenGL.
In the next article we’ll take a deeper look at how to use OpenGL with Python and the libraries mentioned above.
Basic Matrix Operations
To properly be able to use many of the functions in OpenGL, we’ll need some geometry.
Every single point in space can be represented with Cartesian coordinates. Coordinates represent any given point’s location by defining