Meshwork and OpenGL

Meshwork's lean, polygon-efficient models are ideal for use with OpenGL, which is a speedy, cross-platform 3D rendering engine popular with developers of games and other 3D apps. The only problem is that OpenGL has no standard file format, so how do you get your Meshwork models into your OpenGL code?

Brian Barnes has provided a solution with an open-source demo/utility called 3DMF_OpenGL. This does two very useful things:

1. It contains code for reading a 3DMF file into OpenGL (and shows how to display it in a window).
2. It contains code for converting that data to an OpenGL-friendly, binary format (and for reading and writing this format).

So by borrowing Brian's code (which he generously provides for any reasonable use), you have two choices. You can either read 3DMF directly into your application, or you can use 3DMF_OpenGL to convert your models into the binary format, and read that format into your application instead.

Grab 3DMF_OpenGL here:

This should get your Meshwork models into your OpenGL app very quickly! But if you have any difficulties, write to me, Brian, or the Meshwork Discussion List.