The Cherno's OpenGL Series: study plan and how long it takes
The The Cherno playlist is 31 videos and 10.0 hours long. Here's how long it takes at different paces, a week-by-week schedule built from the real videos, and a planner that turns it into your own daily plan.
31 videos · 10.0 hours · The Cherno
The Cherno's OpenGL series teaches modern graphics programming in C++: setting up OpenGL, vertex buffers and drawing a triangle, shaders, index buffers, error handling, abstracting OpenGL into classes, textures, blending, maths with projection matrices, ImGui, a test framework, and batch rendering.
It builds a small renderer step by step and is a popular starting point for game engine development.
Who it's for: C++ programmers who want to learn graphics programming with modern OpenGL.
How long does it take?
The full playlist is 10.0 hours across 31 videos. Here's roughly how many days that is at different daily watch times and speeds, counting video time only:
| Daily time | At 1x | At 1.5x | At 2x |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 min a day | 21 days | 14 days | 11 days |
| 1 h a day | 11 days | 7 days | 6 days |
| 2 h a day | 6 days | 4 days | 3 days |
Make your own schedule
The playlist link is already filled in. Press Plan, set how much time you have each day and your speed, and you'll get a day-by-day schedule with a finish date and a calendar file. It reads the live playlist, so new videos are included.
Week-by-week schedule
A sample plan at 1 hour a day and normal speed, using whole videos so none is split across days. That's 2 weeks in total. For a different pace, start date or speed, use the planner above.
Week 1Videos 1–18 · 6h 15m
Day 1 · 56m
- 1Welcome to OpenGL16m
- 2Setting up OpenGL and Creating a Window in C++22m
- 3Using Modern OpenGL in C++18m
Day 2 · 57m
- 4Vertex Buffers and Drawing a Triangle in OpenGL20m
- 5Vertex Attributes and Layouts in OpenGL19m
- 6How Shaders Work in OpenGL18m
Day 3 · 50m
- 7Writing a Shader in OpenGL28m
- 8How I Deal with Shaders in OpenGL21m
Day 4 · 53m
- 9Index Buffers in OpenGL17m
- 10Dealing with Errors in OpenGL24m
- 11Uniforms in OpenGL12m
Day 5 · 49m
- 12Vertex Arrays in OpenGL22m
- 13Abstracting OpenGL into Classes27m
Day 6 · 52m
- 14Buffer Layout Abstraction in OpenGL30m
- 15Shader Abstraction in OpenGL22m
Day 7 · 59m
- 16Writing a Basic Renderer in OpenGL15m
- 17Textures in OpenGL32m
- 18Blending in OpenGL13m
Week 2Videos 19–31 · 3h 47m
Day 8 · 54m
- 19Maths in OpenGL18m
- 20Projection Matrices in OpenGL20m
- 21Model View Projection Matrices in OpenGL16m
Day 9 · 50m
- 22ImGui in OpenGL15m
- 23Rendering Multiple Objects in OpenGL18m
- 24Setting up a Test Framework for OpenGL17m
Day 10 · 51m
- 25Creating Tests in OpenGL23m
- 26Creating a Texture Test in OpenGL28m
Day 11 · 49m
- 27How to make your UNIFORMS FASTER in OpenGL12m
- 28Batch Rendering - An Introduction12m
- 29Batch Rendering - Colors9m
- 30Batch Rendering - Textures16m
Day 12 · 23m
- 31Batch Rendering - Dynamic Geometry23m
Tips for finishing
- Know C++ well first; The Cherno's C++ series is the natural prerequisite.
- Commit after each video so you can roll back when your renderer shows a black screen.