3d OpenGL applications are the kind of projects that you can show your non-programming friends and they will get what your doing, obviously having a good understanding of rendering scenes within a 3D space is critical in the modern game industry, and all programmers planning on working in the industry need to investigate it, either through OpenGl or DirectX, DirectX is maybe a more complete package if you take into account the DirectInput and DirectSound libraries that are included in the SDK, however having looked at the code it does seem a lot more difficult to follow, and I feel that I only understood what I did of it because I already had a basic grasp of the general principals of 3D rendering gained through my work with OpenGL. I doubt my career will take me down the path of graphics programming, and the aspect of 3D I am most interested in is not how to create the most life-like scenes in terms of graphics, lighting, shadows etc, but rather how to make objects move through the 3D space in the most life-like or realistic way.
Below are a couple of clips showing my submission for my 3D graphics project, the first clip with flat terrain is my actual submission, and the second clip shows my attempt at creating a more varied terrain, I couldn’t quite get the interpolation right however.
(These clips will be replaced when I get my hands on some decent vidcap software).