Real-time 3D Character Animation with Visual C++

3	Drawing points and polygons the easy way with OpenGL

OpenGL is a graphics library that essentially takes lists of vertices in world space, turns these into polygons and paints them to a 2D buffer that can be displayed. The library includes the ability to shade and texture (apply a section of a bitmap to) these polygons. OpenGL can be used to display transparent polygons and can use fogging to facilitate distance culling. If distance culling is used without some kind of fogging, then it can result in an annoying popping on and off for distant objects. The most important feature of OpenGL is that it uses hardware wherever possible to speed up processor-intensive operations. Before you can use OpenGL on a Windows machine you need to set up ...