Hi everybody, I decide to learn OPEN-GL ES for IPHONE development, but I know nothing about graphics programing. So I've some questions.
1 I know OPEN-GL ES is a series of open standard API. IPHONE still use these standard API or apple define it's own API for OPENGL ES?
2 Before I start to learn OPEN-GL ES, I think I should be familiar with OPEN-GL. Am I right?
The best book I've found for learning OpenGL ES is the OpenGL® ES 2.0 Programming Guide.
Oh, and no, you don't need to know OpenGL first. OpenGL is strongly related, but ES is a complete spec on its own. Apple follows the spec completely as far as I'm aware.
The best site which i have found to learn OpenGL for iphone are :
1) nehe.gamedev
You have a couple of things to look into:
1) Getting done with the boiler plate, ie the iPhone related software calls required to integrate OpenGL-ES.
2) Learning the basics of OpenGL ES
For the first one, I'd recommend looking into:
from apple. This actually demonstrates both ES1 and ES2 code and even allows using either depending on hardware. But it's not really that you need to understand everything in there to get started. What is more interesting is that it's easy to build on this code to follow other GL-ES tutorials not made for the iPhone but sharing the same gl code. OpenGL/ES1/ES2 are extensible, yet reliable standards - the core set of functions described on the Khronos website:
OpenGLES specs and resources at Khronos
is available on the iPhone, Symbian and other platforms...
To learn OpenGL ES you definitely don't need to know OpenGL. actually you can just pick any variant you need to learn and learning another won't be hard. If it's your first time I wouldn't recommend starting with an OpenGL tutorial - although it's tempting because there's so much material around, it can bring confusion and waste time (even though NeHe's tutorial, easy to find, proven and ported to many platforms, is still a little tempting)
I'm currently looking into this site, which looks good to get started or re-started (although the layout isn't great, the content is there, clear titles, simple code and fairly concise but good explanations):
I'm also writing OpenGL-ES tutorials at the moment. Maybe have a look at
At the time of this writing there's precious little, and growing :)
BTW for some reason Maurice Simon's cool tutorials don't seem to be available anymore...
PS: @Kornel - the interface prevents new, unregistered users from posting many links.