Computer Graphics Through OpenGL, 2nd Edition

Chapter 19

Fixed-Functionality Pipelines

At the end of Chapter 4 about moving and shaping objects and manipulating the OpenGL camera, we said that it was like having got our driver’s license. It’s time now to look at the engine under the hood to understand the whole process, from ignition to motion. So in this chapter we are going to study graphics rendering pipelines – processes that transform a user-defined scene into an image on a raster display.

The particular topic of this chapter, though, is fixed-functionality pipelines where, once the programmer has specified the scene, she has little further say in the rendering process. In this category falls the first-generation synthetic-camera pipeline, which, in fact, our OpenGL programs thus ...