OpenGL glutWireCube works but glutWireCylinder doesn't. What am I doing wrong?

Question

OpenGL glutWireCube works but glutWireCylinder doesn't.

glutWireCylinder throws an 'undefined' error. How can this be?

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

That function is not defined because GLUT does not have a function named glutWireCylinder(). This is based on the official GLUT documentation here:

https://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs/glut/spec3/spec3.html

If you don't mind using legacy features, the GLU (GL Utility) library has a function for drawing cylinders (see man page for details).

// setup
GLUquadric* quadric = gluNewQuadric();
gluQuadricDrawStyle(quadric, GLU_LINE);

// drawing
gluCylinder(radius, radius, height, 32, 8);

// cleanup
gluDeleteQuadrc(quadric);

If you don't want to use deprecated libraries, writing code to draw a cylinder is easy to write yourself. My answer here shows how to draw a circle, which gets you most of the way to drawing a cylinder: How to draw a circle using VBO in ES2.0.