Resources on basics of 3D model rendering

Maybe I've missed something, but I couldn't find any questions about this already. If anyone knows of any then it would be great if you could post the links.

I know there's loads of massive opensource engines out there already that it'd be really easy to use, it's not a problem of needing one, but I don't like not knowing how the things I want to use work. But looking around, I can't find anything on it. I'm not some masochistic nutjob on a crazy lone mission to make a开发者_JAVA百科n engine.

I've done all the basics of OpenGL already, I can hardcode it to draw something, I don't need a complete runthrough from first starting it, but I haven't a clue how to move that on to rendering a model, and nothing anywhere seems to explain it. I've tried to see if I can find anything on the structure of any file types to see if I could figure out myself how you use them to render the model, but that was a bit of a dead end.

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Section 24 of the OpenGL FAQ has some topics covering loading/rendering of various file formats. Specifically section 24.040.

One of the more common formats that is used with OpenGL is the obj file format, probably because many programs can export to it. There's plenty of resources around regarding obj to Google up.