Required Reading?

[Miserableman]

Not for you, for me :O)

I'm new to this Celestia lark. My girlfriend is doing her final year project this year, a web based tutorial on OpenGL which features sphere rendering. I thought this was great, and the idea grew and grew until I eventually decided I'd like to do a solar system you could fly around as my final year project (for next year). I didn't think I'd be able to do it, but now I find that someone has written 95% of my code for me :OD This Celestia program is superb, and I'd like to become a community contributor to the project.

Only problem is my lack of detailed knowledge on how 3D graphics actually work. Does Chris or anyone else know of any helpful sites/books that are useful to read? I'm looking primarily for help on the inner workings of graphics cards, OpenGL and how the code for something that is simulated in realtime works a la Celestia. Is there any documentation on the code that's already been written, or do we have to cope as best we can?

Thanks for any help in advance :O)

[Incognito]

Here are some links to Opengl programming for you. These are mostly concerned with game programming and SDL but you should find these useful

http://www.libsdl.org/opengl/intro.html
http://cone3d.gamedev.net/cgi-bin/index ... ladv/index

[Matt McIrvin]

Only problem is my lack of detailed knowledge on how 3D graphics actually work. Does Chris or anyone else know of any helpful sites/books that are useful to read? I'm looking primarily for help on the inner workings of graphics cards, OpenGL and how the code for something that is simulated in realtime works a la Celestia. Is there any documentation on the code that's already been written, or do we have to cope as best we can?

This isn't specifically about OpenGL or graphics cards, but if you want background on the basic algorithms involved in 3D computer graphics, you can't do better than Foley, van Dam, Feiner, and Hughes, _Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice_, 2nd ed. (The first edition was called _Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics_; the second edition is considerably expanded with programming examples in either C or Pascal-- you can buy either version).