3D CAD to OpenGL?

Question

I was wondering if anyone knew of a program that can take a 3D drawing of an object and then convert it into the required OpenGL points and normals. Basically I have an AutoCAD drawing of that I want to be able to display in a program I am creating for iPhone. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can compile it into a

Vertex vertices[] = {{posx, posy, posz, texu, texv, ..},

{posx, posy, posz, texu, texv, ..},

//...

}

and then loop over them:

glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES);

for (int i = 0; i < arraycount(vertices); i++){

glTexCoord2f(vertices[i].texu, vertices[i].texv);

//...

glVertex3f(vertices[i].posx, vertices[i].posy, vertices[i].posz);

}

glEnd();

Another solution would be to mimic what the modern vertex buffer based solutions do by creating a VertexAttributeLayout struct and setting it up. Then in the loop you interpret the layout struct and interpret the data as needed.

The best workflow (and answer to this question) would be as follows:

Export the CAD models to Wavefront OBJ format

Integrate the fixed-pipeline rendering implementation of open-source OBJ viewer into the code base.