Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Loading .OBJ 3D model files in OpenGL code

Tudor Carean provides an extended version of GLM and tutorial on how to use it in your code. He also provides tutorials on Creating a 3D Model, Exporting the model, Getting GLM, Importing the model in C++ and Details about GLM structure.
I would personally prefer sticking to the original GLM, instead of the one Tudor wrote, just because I believe its would be safer. You can download the original GLM from here.


What is GLM?[0]
Glm is a library that was provided in the examples folder of the GLUT source distribution. It provides API functions to read Wavefront .OBJ file (and corresponding .mtl materials file), and also for rendering these models in your openGL program. The required input files can be generated using 3DS Max or MeshLab (see here to know how to do that). Basically GLM knows how to read a Wavefront .OBJ file and knows how to draw it on the screen exactly the way it looked in 3D Studio Max. Well actually it can do a lot more[0].
GLM reads the model files into a data structure it calls as _GLMmodel. To know more about this data structure and understand its internals you can read Tudor Carean's tutorial for the same.


Good Online Sources for Downloading Free 3D Models 

1 comment:

  1. Hi, i have problems with loading my 3ds max models(converted to .obj format) into glm...every time i try to load the model, it pretends to load and then crashes any help.
    i am basically using the same example file in the3dcodingtutorial.com website....please i need your advice on what to do

    thanks

    ReplyDelete