Texture tutorial mapping a map to an Open GL ES sphere?

Question

I am not looking for a library or even open source. I want to learn how to do it on my own.

Where can I start an online tutorial, book or other training material to create a polygonal model of a 3D sphere suitable for applying to Open GL ES on an iPhone, and then map the polygons to some kind of 2D map data so that the texture can display the sphere? Is there some kind of software tool (blender? Maya?) With a tutorial on how to create this data? Where is the best place to start?

Answer 1

How about these articles?

• Procedural Areas in OpenGL ES
• OpenGL ES From scratch, part 6: Textures and texture mapping

Answer 2

I heard good things about iPhone 3D Programming . Jeff LaMarche also recommends here .

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

While I am not OpenGL ES, I once tried porting the examples from this chapter in the Red Book, where they show how to create an icosahedron and split it to get smooth spheres. I just got to the point of using a simple icosahedron to roughly represent the scope in the code for my Molecules application. Perhaps you can expand this.

Apple has a Mac example application, GLSLShowpiece , which textures the sphere in several places, but they use gluSphere() to generate spherical vertices that are not available in OpenGL ES.

Honestly, I am replacing the rendering code of the sphere in Molecules with a two-dimensional poster, which uses shaders to generate the color of the sphere. This should provide much smoother spheres without resorting to huge geometries. See this article for results you can create in this way.