CMPT 370 Spring 2009 Lab4 (30 pts): Trackball and Textures

• OpenGL lighting with Gouraud shading,
• Texture maps, and
• A trackball interface to navigate the virtual world

Basic requirements

• Create a 3D virtual world in OpenGL that is lit and smooth-shaded: create lights (more than just ambient), add material properties to your objects, and specify vertex normals.
• Use texture maps appropriately to liven up your virtual world.
• Add a trackball mouse interface to rotate around the world: from mouse (x,y) motion (hint: consider FLTK handle() or GLUT), construct an axis-angle representation of the rotation, and use glRotate(). (You do not need to build quaternions, because glRotate() will do it for you.)
• Make your 3D virtual world appealing; have fun with it! (That's a project requirement!)

  Extra credit (up to 3 pts, only if basic requirements are met)

• For extra credit, allow the user to "toss" the rotation of an object: if the user releases the mouse button while still moving the mouse, the object continues to rotate on its own in the same direction. (Consider FLTK timeouts.)
• Provide a way to stop the animation (perhaps by single-clicking the mouse).

  Modelling Resources

• If you'd like to read in more complex models rather than generating your own, a fairly basic library to read Alias Wavefront OBJ files is Nate Robins' GLM. You can get it from many places, e.g., Avimator's SVN (glm.cpp and glm.h). Basic usage (see the header file):

  #include "glm.h"
  GLMmodel* myModel = glmReadOBJ("myfile.obj", 0);
  glmDraw(myModel, GLM_NONE, 0);
  

• Another format that is very simple to read in is AC3D's format: description and sample source code are at Inivis' AC3D site.
• AC3D is also a very easy modelling program that you can use; you can download a free 14-day trial (Win/Mac/Linux) from their website.
• Rhino is a more full-featured professional modelling software suite that is used by many animation studios. They have a evaluation version that only saves 25 times.
• Blender is a very powerful modelling/animation/game-environment package that is also used by many animation studios; it is completely free to download and use. (It also scripts in Python!) But it is quite complex to learn.

  Lab write-up

• Follow the template lab write-up to document your program. Name your write-up:
  your_name_lab4_writeup.doc (or .txt, etc.)
  Put it in the same project directory as your code so that it will be included in the tarball.

  Electronic turn-in

• Put everything (C++ code, header files, executable, lab write-up) into a tarball/ZIP and upload it to myCourses under "Lab4":
  your_name_lab4.zip