Colors, Lighting, Blending & Fog

Looking at a world of solid colors is confusing. It's hard to judge where objects are and near impossible to tell anything about an object other than its silouette.

This chapter begins by taking a look at how basic colors work in OpenGL. Then we will move on to more realistic colors using lighting and materials. We will take a quick detour into one method for drawing shadows, then we'll look at how transparency and other effects can be achieved trough blending. Finally we will look at OpenGL's built-in fog support.

In this chapter we are going to cover

• Colors in OpenGL
• Shading
• OpenGL lighting
• Light sources
• Materials
• Blending and Transperancy
• Fog