This is a hybrid GTK/OpenGL program for experimenting with the OpenGL lighting model. This program lets you set the colors and positions of three GTK light sources, and watch the effect that has on a simple 3D scene. You can select whether the scene contains a rotating cube, sphere, or teapot, and whether that object has a texture image on its surface.
Light Lab is not a modeling program; it doesn't even let you save anything. But if you're having trouble wrapping your brain around the various parameters you can set in OpenGL code, you may find it helpful.
I distribute Light Lab as source code only. Here it is as a gzipped tar file:
It requires GTK 1.2 or newer, and an implementation of OpenGL (such as Mesa.)
This program was inspired by a like-named GLUT program by Mark J. Kilgard. His program allowed one to turn lights on and off, and set the color of objects as a demo of how lighting works, but did not have controls to allow one to experiment with specific light positions colors, which is why I wrote this.
For learning OpenGL programming, I highly recommend Mark's book, ``OpenGL Programming for the X Window System,'' Addison-Wesley 1996, ISBN 0-201-48359-9.