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I am new to openGL and I am reading the redbook. Now, as an exercise I want to manually draw a sphere. For that I am dividing the sphere into slices and stacks, and thus I get multiple rectangles, but near the poles of the sphere I get triangles. (hope this was clear what I am doing). Now I know that if you draw a polygon with GL_POLYGON and it happens to intersect itself, the behavior is undefined. My question is this: given three points v1, v2, v3 which are not on one line, is it undefined behavior to do this:

glBegin(GL_POLYGON)
vertex v1
vertex v1
vertex v2
vertex v3
glEnd();

This may be combining two unrelated questions into one, but I am wondering also this: if I choose to divide the rectangles in my sphere routine into triangles, does it matter how I do it, that is, by which diagonal I divide the rect into two triangles? I am guessing that for drawing a single-colored sphere it won't matter, but I don't know about textures, shaders, lighting etc.

user1118321
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Armen Tsirunyan
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2 Answers2

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When I was doing openGL stuff, I quickly stuck to using just triangles. They are special in that a triangle is not ambiguous in any way.

You example though, I would imagine this will work, though probably with artefacts.

how you split a rectangle shouldn't matter, just as long as you pay attention to which way your triangles are wound, which way you define the points as this is what dictates their front and back.

But definitely stick to triangles, images these four points of a square

(0,0,0) (1,0,0) (1,0,1) (0,0,1)

Fairly easy to see it is a flat square, but what if I change them to

(0,1,0) (1,0,0) (1,1,1) (0,0,1)

what do you have now? it could be drawn like a valley or like a hill. if I defined this shape with triangles, you know exactly what I am describing

(0,1,0) (1,0,0) (1,1,1) (1,1,1) (1,0,1) (0,1,0)

A hill like shape

ok... so I side tracked a little here... my point is, I don't know what your code would do in practice, but I don't think you should use it any way. and how you split up rectangles shouldn't matter as long as your triangles are described the right way around.

thecoshman
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This is no problem whatsoever. OpenGL always has to be able to deal with the possibility of rasterising geometry where multiple vertices fall in the same location since even different input points may end up as the same output point depending on your modelview and projection matrices (or your geometry and/or vertex shader if you're on the programmable pipeline). It is designed to deal in the mathematically correct way under a wide variety of edge cases.

OpenGL's primary test for whether to paint a pixel with geometry is whether its centre falls within the mathematical bounds of the primitive being drawn*. So OpenGL can render polygons that paint non-continuous sets of pixels (which generally happens when they become almost vanishingly thin) or that paint no pixels whatsoever (which tends to be when they end up really small, but they may technically be of arbitrarily large size as long as they squeeze between pixel centres).

The exact tests used at the hardware level may vary from vendor to vendor and are guaranteed to be correct only for geometry that is convex on screen — which is why most people say stick to triangles, since they're unavoidably convex.

(*) a separate screen-oriented test being applied to pixels exactly on a boundary to ensure they're attributed to only exactly one polygon where polygons meet along a common edge

Tommy
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