Running your first example

We would like to introduce one of the funniest openFrameworks examples, which we like a lot. The example captures the images from a webcam and draws it on the screen as a fancy 3D surface, as shown in the following picture:

3D surface generated by an openFrameworks example

This is the meshFromCamera example located in the examples/3d folder.

We cannot run the example immediately after installing openFrameworks. The reason is that openFrameworks examples are distributed as source files only, without executable files that you can run.

To obtain the executable file, we need to build the project, that is, compile its C++ source code to machine code and link it into an executable file. Let's do it and then run the example by performing the following steps:

This example involves several topics, such as capturing frames from the camera, creating 3D surfaces, and texturing them. You will discover these topics in Chapter 4, Working with Raster Graphics – Images, Videos, and Shaders, and Chapter 5, Creating 3D Graphics, and will be able to build similar and even more sophisticated projects easily.