OpenGL 3D Renderer (from scratch)

A small real-time 3D renderer written from scratch in C++ and OpenGL — built to learn the graphics pipeline end to end, without leaning on a game engine.

What it does

• Renders 3D meshes with indexed geometry
• Free-fly camera (WASD + mouse look)
• Texture loading via stb_image and sampling in-shader
• Phong lighting (ambient / diffuse / specular) with a separate light source object
• Thin, reusable abstractions over raw OpenGL handles: VAO, VBO, EBO, Texture, shaderClass
• GLSL shaders: default.vert / default.frag (lit objects) and light.vert / light.frag (light source)

Tech

C++ · OpenGL · GLAD · GLFW · GLM · stb_image

Build

Open OpenGLProject.sln in Visual Studio 2022 and build for x64. Third-party dependencies are vendored under Libraries/, so no extra setup is required.

Why it's here

This was my first deep dive into low-level real-time rendering — figuring out how vertices, buffers, shaders and the transformation pipeline actually fit together beneath a game engine.