You do not need to turn anything in for this assignment, by it is absolutely fundamental to the rest of the class.  Complete it on time!

Ogre

We will be using Ogre --  an Object-oriented, Graphics Rendering Engine -- for the projects in this course.  For the first "assignment", you will get your environment ready, so you can hit the ground running for the first "real" assignment.  You need to:

• Go to the Ogre download page. You want to use the latest version of OGRE, 1.9. You are welcome to use the prebuilt version of the SDK, but are encouraged to build from source. Note that you want to use version 1.9 (earlier versions are different!) of Ogre. I recommend using the Visual Studio 2012 version of the SDK, since that is the version of visual studio we have installed in the labs. While I recommend using Windows, you may use other platforms (OSX or linux). Note that windows is the "supported" work environment, so you will need to do extra work on your own to get things running in OSX or Linux. Past students have successfully gotten all three platforms to work correctly, so the task is not impossible, but working in windows will make you life a little easier.
• Assmuning you are using the SDK, open the OGRE.sln solution file. Build this soultion, and set the startup project as SampleBrowser. Run the sample browser. Run the SampleBrowser project and see all the neat demos. Some of them may not work on your hardware (some require hardware shaders), but most of them should work just fine.
• Create and set an enviornment variable OGRE_HOME to point to this sdk directory.

Blender

We will be building models using Blender. While blender is installed in the labs, if you want to work at home (and trust me, you will!) you should download and install it on your own machine. You will need to

• Download blender from the Blender home page. I recommend 2.69, since that is known to play nice with Ogre. You are welcome to try an more recent version, though those are untested.
• Dowload the Ogre Command Line Tools (http://www.ogre3d.org/download/tools), which are used by the:
• Dowload the Blender-to-Ogre Converter (https://bitbucket.org/iboshkov/blender2ogre)

2D Image Creation Program

Download your favorite 2D image creation program. I use gimp, but any 2D image creation/manipulation program is fine.

Visual Studio

I strongly recommend using Visual Studio 2012. It's a very nice IDE, and 2012 is what is in the labs. (2013 / 2014 don't play quite as nicely with the precomipled OGRE SDK, but can be made to work. Unless you have a strong preference for 2013 / 2014, I'd just use 2012.). You can get the free express version, or get the (I believe also free) professional version through the USF website for students.

Note

This is going to take a lot longer than you think it is. Getting everything working will take some time. There will be much frustration as nothing works quite right the first (or second!) time. Allow yourself more time that you think you will need. Then double that. Then perhaps double it again. Getting complex software working correctly is a non-trivial skill, and is one of the learning outcomes for this class.

If you've beaten your head against the wall and aren't getting anywhere, please see me so that I can help out. However, you should spend some time yourself trying to get it to work before you see me.

Since it is the beginning of the semester, and you still should have some time, take a look at some of the tutorials.  You'll thank yourself later!