Beginner guide to OpenGLES on iPhone

Question

Does anyone know a good beginners guide to using OpenGLES on the iPhone? I have found some but they all require assumed knowledge which I don't have.

Answer 1

For OpenGL NeHe is a great tutorial. Though, it doesn't specifically cover OpenGLES, it should still be pretty helpful. Just be prepared to run into things now and again that won't work on the iphone.

Also you can get v1.1 if "The Red Book" online.

Answer 2

You need only one reference:

• http://www.khronos.org/opengles/sdk/1.1/docs/man/

Yeah, some of the documentation doesn't make a lot of sense the first time you read it, but really, read the sentence/paragraph/page again, and again. It really does make sense, and it's very accurate. Which is something you really can't say from tutorials. Tutorials are almost always written by people that don't seem too fussed about leaving out important details while documentation like that is usually written by very nitpicky people that cram every little important fact into (possibly overly-complex) sentences.

Oh, and one golden tip: Add a search function to your browser that does this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site%3Awww.khronos.org%2Fopengles%2Fsdk%2F1.1%2Fdocs%2Fman%2F&btnI

(replace %s by whatever your browser's search term replacement string is, the above example is for Opera)

I've bound it to the o prefix, so whenever I need to look something up on OpenGL/ES, I just type o glDrawElements in the address bar and instantly get the documentation page on it.

Answer 3

Once again, if I may plug my own work, I have a short writeup on what I learned while writing Molecules for the iPhone. I came into this having no experience with the 3-D side of OpenGL (I had done a little 2-D hardware acceleration before), so I have a bit of a different perspective on the subject. The source code to Molecules is available, so you might be able to learn something from poking around inside it. I also have written a post on how to use Core Animation structures and functions to accelerate OpenGL ES rendering, if you want something a little more technical.

Bill Dudney has a post here about how he started getting into OpenGL ES, and then a follow-on here where he provides code for a Wavefront OBJ loader for the iPhone.

I believe that I've seen a few more good resources around Stack Overflow in various answers, so you might search around and see what else you can find here.

Answer 4

In addition to "The Red Book", another useful book -with tutorials and reference- is OpenGL SuperBible.

Again not OpenGLES specific, but I believe it is useful to learn OpenGL features in general, then filter out the ones you don't need.

Answer 5

Simon Maurice has some great tutorials on the very first steps. Take a look: http://web.me.com/smaurice/AppleCoder/iPhone_OpenGL/Archive.html. Do them from the beginning and you'll have a good sense of the basics.

Answer 6

Simon Maurice's tutorial can be found here

Answer 7

"The Red Book" is not recommended to OpenGL/OpenGLES beginner. It is book for professionals. The first step is should try to run downloaded simple programs or simple codes from OpenGL web sites.