Book Image

OpenGL Data Visualization Cookbook

Book Image

OpenGL Data Visualization Cookbook

Overview of this book

OpenGL is a great multi-platform, cross-language, and hardware-accelerated graphics interface for visualizing large 2D and 3D datasets. Data visualization has become increasingly challenging using conventional approaches as datasets become larger and larger, especially with the Big Data evolution. From a mobile device to a sophisticated high-performance computing cluster, OpenGL libraries provide developers with an easy-to-use interface to create stunning visuals in 3D in real time for a wide range of interactive applications. This book provides a series of easy-to-follow, hands-on tutorials to create appealing OpenGL-based visualization tools with minimal development time. We will first illustrate how to quickly set up the development environment in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Next, we will demonstrate how to visualize data for a wide range of applications using OpenGL, starting from simple 2D datasets to increasingly complex 3D datasets with more advanced techniques. Each chapter addresses different visualization problems encountered in real life and introduces the relevant OpenGL features and libraries in a modular fashion. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the essential skills to develop a wide range of impressive OpenGL-based applications for your unique data visualization needs, on platforms ranging from conventional computers to the latest mobile/wearable devices.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
OpenGL Data Visualization Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Rendering 3D models with points, lines, and triangles


The next step after importing the 3D model is to display the content on the screen using an intuitive and aesthetically pleasing way. Many complex scenes consist of multiple surfaces (meshes) and many vertices. In the previous chapter, we implemented a simple shader program to visualize the point cloud at various depth values based on a heat map. In this section, we will utilize very simple primitives (points, lines, and triangles) with transparency to create skeleton-like rendering effects.

How to do it...

We will continue the implementation of the ObjLoader class to support loading vertices and draw the graphics for each mesh in the scene.

In the source file of ObjLoader.cpp, we add a recursive function to extract all vertices from the scene and store them in a single vertex buffer array. This allows us to reduce the number of vertex buffers to be managed, thus reducing the complexity of the code:

void ObjLoader::loadVertices(GLfloat *g_vertex_buffer_data...