OpenGL 3 and OpenGL 4 with GLSL
Required:
- CMake 3.14 or higher - Download
- C/C++ Compiler:
- Windows: Visual Studio 2013+ (MSVC)
- Linux: GCC or Clang
- macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools
- Git - For fetching dependencies
- OpenGL 3.2+ compatible graphics driver
Check if CMake is installed:
cmake --versionShould show version 3.14 or higher.
Check if Git is installed:
git --versionDependencies (GLFW and GLEW) are automatically downloaded and built via CMake FetchContent.
Windows (Visual Studio):
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .Linux / macOS:
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
makeExecutables will be in the Binaries/ directory.
All dependencies are automatically fetched and built:
- GLFW 3.4 - Windowing and input
- GLEW 2.2.0 - OpenGL Extension Wrangler
- OpenGL 3.2+ - System graphics library
All 46 examples demonstrate various OpenGL 3.x and 4.x features with GLSL shaders.
- Example01 - Basic window and OpenGL 3 initialization
- Example02 - Rendering of a triangle
- Example03 - Grey filter
- Example04 - Perspective rendering of a cube
- Example05 - Phong rendering of a sphere
- Example06 - Texturing of a cube
- Example07 - Normal mapping
- Example08 - Environment/cube mapping
- Example09 - GPU Particles
- Example10 - Geometry shader
- Example11 - Reflection and refraction
- Example12 - Shadow mapping
- Example13 - Simple tessellation (OpenGL 4.1)
- Example14 - Terrain rendering (OpenGL 4.1)
- Example15 - Water rendering
- Example16 - Model loading and rendering
- Example17 - Clipping planes and two sided rendering
- Example18 - Using stencil buffer and clipping planes
- Example19 - Render to texture and planar reflection
- Example20 - Texture matrix, alpha blending and discarding
- Example21 - Compute shader (OpenGL 4.3)
- Example22 - Shadow volumes
- Example23 - Displacement mapping (OpenGL 4.1)
- Example24 - Erode effect using perlin noise
- Example25 - Model with groups and materials
- Example26 - Fur rendering
- Example27 - Projection shadow for directional light
- Example28 - Screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) (OpenGL 4.1)
- Example29 - CPU ray tracing
- Example30 - GPU ray tracing using compute shader (OpenGL 4.3)
- Example31 - Many lights using deferred shading (OpenGL 4.1)
- Example32 - BRDF and IBL rendering (OpenGL 4.1)
- Example33 - Real-Time BRDF and IBL rendering (OpenGL 4.1)
- Example34 - Subsurface scattering
- Example35 - Order independent transparency using depth peeling
- Example36 - Order independent transparency using linked list (OpenGL 4.4)
- Example37 - CPU ray marching
- Example38 - Basic usage of program pipeline and separable programs (OpenGL 4.1)
- Example39 - Basic usage of program pipeline, separable programs and shader subroutines (OpenGL 4.1)
- Example40 - Cloth simulation using compute shader (OpenGL 4.3)
- Example41 - Ocean wave height/normal map calculation with FFT using compute shader (OpenGL 4.3)
- Example42 - Fast Approximate Anti Aliasing - FXAA (OpenGL 4.3)
- Example43 - Scene with several models having groups and materials
- Example44 - Conservative rasterization
- Example45 - GPU voxelization (OpenGL 4.4)
- Example46 - Voxel cone tracing - Global illumination (OpenGL 4.4)
Real-time global illumination using voxel cone tracing based on Crassin et al. 2011. The Sponza scene is first voxelized into a 64³ RGBA8 3D texture with a dominant-axis geometry shader. Mipmaps are generated for the voxel grid, then the final pass traces six diffuse cones plus a specular cone per fragment to compute indirect illumination, ambient occlusion, and specular reflections.
Simplifications vs. the original paper:
| Aspect | Paper | This implementation |
|---|---|---|
| Scene representation | Sparse Voxel Octree (SVO) — adaptive, high-resolution | Flat 64³ RGBA8 3D texture — simpler, lower resolution |
| Voxel filtering | Anisotropic pre-filtering: per-face directional radiance propagated up the octree | Isotropic glGenerateMipmap box filter |
| Radiance storage | Per-face (6 directions) for directional shadowing | Single isotropic value per voxel |
| Voxel write | Atomic accumulation when multiple triangles cover the same voxel | Plain imageStore (last-write-wins) |
