This is a retrospective post so bare with me. Also Wix seems to think this was 2018 but it was 2019. Very strange.
Getting started in OpenGL is a big challenge. There are so many tutorials and so many different versions of OpenGL.
I decided to buy a course on Udemy. Can't remember the name but you'll likely find it by searching "C++ Modern OpenGL". That website always has sales with massive discounts so no, I didn't pay £200, it was more like £20.
It was well worth the money even though I picked up some bad practices. To investigation further I followed Antons Tutorials (The book is well worth the money as it explains everything in English and not "Mathmaticians English") and OpenGL Shader Language Cookbook (Bit more expensive but has great resources and is more professional). I highly recommend both of these.
Below is what I got out of both of those books really. The messy particles are from the OpenGL Cookbook uses a compute shader to apply the Euler acceleration method to particles that are being pulled into 2 black holes and spat out the other side.
The weird cubes underneath is me messing around trying to make a 3D volumetric texture. The texture is written to make cubes that iterate through the RGBA channels. and as the player moves, the texture moves too, which is why it's changing colour.
I originally thought it wasn't working because it's obviously not rendered volumetrically. I later solved this using a raytrace algorythm, pinched from Nvideas smoke demo made back in 2009, and converted it from HSLS to GLSL and popped it in the fractal shader. But this post is long enough and the result is uglier than these gifs so I'm gonna leave it here.
The videos submission of my OpenGL got 93/100. If I'm allowed, I'll share the video.
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