OpenGL Course @ Havelsan, Ankara, Turkey

What an awesome and intellectually satisfying time I had in Ankara, Turkey giving a course on OpenGL to 16 wonderful people at Havelsan.

I have been conducting OpenGL courses for close to ten years now, but this was the first time I gave a course on “OpenGL – Programmable Pipeline”.

I had been to Havelsan about 6 years ago to conduct a course on Qt. I had thoroughly enjoyed my experience of Qt training back then. And I was looking forward to meet them again.

We started the course by learning the OpenGL API and GLSL to render simple 2D shapes like rectangles, triangles, stars, gears and land-maps.

Then we moved on to rendering 3D solid models by learning how to construct geometry & topology of objects like cube, cone, cylinder, sphere & torus.

Then we started learning about fragment shaders by figuring out how to light the torus properly.

We then continued exploring fragment shaders by learning about shadows, cube-maps & normal maps.

We then learned about height-maps

We then learned about optimising rendering performance while rendering large number of similar objects using instancing.

And, rendering large models. (This one has 3.2 million triangles)

The training lasted for 5 days, with 8 hours of classes each day. It was mix of hands-on & slides for the participants.

I had a lot of fun taking this course and I definitely learned a LOT from answering the questions raised by the participants. I am happy to have received a good 4.4 rating at the end of the course :-).

The Turks are warm and wonderful people. Infact some of the participants from the previous Qt training made time to meet me. They have moved on in their careers @ Havelsan and moved into higher posts. Yet, they took time of their schedule to meet with me. How nice is that? Umit and Gürol (who I had become friends with, the previous time I went there) offered to host me for dinner on Friday evening. It was wonderful catching up with them.

Looking forward to find another reason to visit Havelsan and the team.