3-d animation in C++

Question

I am doing a scientific project in C++ and I need to draw simple animated 3-d images of moving atomic groups. What is a good and convenient graphics library to do that? Some general remarks are also appreciated. I work in Linux.

Thank you in advance, Roman

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 18 '11 at 14:55

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OpenGL of course,

one library you could use is glut for that.

have a look on http://nehe.gamedev.net/

answered Feb 18 '11 at 14:55

Joseph Le Brech

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I have worked a little in OpenGL before, and it seems to me that's an overkill. Is it object-oriented? It'd be really good, if it was. – grzkv Feb 18 '11 at 14:59
For very small demo's OOP shouldn't be needed. if if was a lot more complex some libraries will abstract that for you. – Joseph Le Brech Feb 18 '11 at 15:04
Which libraries would you recommend? – grzkv Feb 18 '11 at 15:15
it's too low level, so anything non-trivial would take enormous efforts. – Gene Bushuyev Feb 18 '11 at 15:25

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 18 '11 at 15:21

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If you want to show 3D in linux, you should use OpenGL. But since it is a C library, you can use a wrapper, like for example glt or sfml

answered Feb 18 '11 at 15:21

BЈовић

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 18 '11 at 15:23

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The easiest library to use is Vtk. A more difficult and slower, but potentially better rasterization can be achieved using POVRAY.

answered Feb 18 '11 at 15:23

Gene Bushuyev

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 18 '11 at 15:30

I suggest looking at game oriented graphics engines. They provide OO wrappers around openGL and have lots of utility functions for loading 3d model formats etc.

If you don't want to get bogged down in writing the graphics, a game oriented renderer is likely the fastest way for you to get stuff on screen.

Ogre may be a good choice - it has a fairly large and helpful community.

Irrlicht is another possibility.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 18 '11 at 16:07

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There are several possibilities, some perhaps more suitable than others, obviously!

I think any one of the options mentioned above would serve to do so.

I personally recommend OSG.

http://www.openscenegraph.org/projects/osg

answered Feb 18 '11 at 16:07

Daniel Santos

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3-d animation in C++

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