Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By : Muhammad Mobeen Movania
Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By: Muhammad Mobeen Movania

Overview of this book

OpenGL is the leading cross-language, multi-platform API used by masses of modern games and applications in a vast array of different sectors. Developing graphics with OpenGL lets you harness the increasing power of GPUs and really take your visuals to the next level. OpenGL Development Cookbook is your guide to graphical programming techniques to implement 3D mesh formats and skeletal animation to learn and understand OpenGL. OpenGL Development Cookbook introduces you to the modern OpenGL. Beginning with vertex-based deformations, common mesh formats, and skeletal animation with GPU skinning, and going on to demonstrate different shader stages in the graphics pipeline. OpenGL Development Cookbook focuses on providing you with practical examples on complex topics, such as variance shadow mapping, GPU-based paths, and ray tracing. By the end you will be familiar with the latest advanced GPU-based volume rendering techniques.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
OpenGL Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Implementing object picking using color


Another method which is used for picking objects in a 3D world is color-based picking. In this recipe, we will use the same scene as in the last recipe.

Getting ready

The code for this recipe is in the Chapter2/Picking_ColorBuffer folder. Relevant source files are in the Chapter2/src folder.

How to do it…

To enable picking with the color buffer, the following steps are needed:

  1. Disable dithering. This is done to prevent any color mismatch during the query:

    glDisable(GL_DITHER);
  2. In the mouse down event handler, read the color value at the clicked position from the color buffer using the glReadPixels function:

    GLubyte pixel[4];
    glReadPixels(x, HEIGHT-y, 1, 1, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, pixel);
  3. Compare the color value at the clicked point to the color values of all objects to find the intersection:

    selected_box=-1;
    if(pixel[0]==255 && pixel[1]==0 && pixel[2]==0) {
      cout<<"picked box 1"<<endl;
      selected_box = 0;
    }
    if(pixel[0]==0 &amp...