CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++macoscocoaopengl
Pascal
Pascal

Reputation: 851

Glut/Glu alternatives on OSX 10.9 for drawing primitives like spheres

I decided to do some OpenGL programming on OSX. I created a small NSOpenGLView class in order for me to get an OpenGL view in cocoa.

From there my plan was to switch to C++ and create an object model to draw shapes. Having no interest in reinventing the wheel I decided to use glutWireSphere to represent my sphere class. Interestingly XCode throws a deprecation warning for ~90% of all the glu and glut functions. Including the sphere function.

Is there an Apple library that provides primitives similar to Glut? Am I missing something? Is there a current HowTo for OpenGL programming on OSX (OpenGL >= 3.2)? I'm currently looking through the OpenGL Programming Guide for Mac but that doesn't seem to cover it. Googling it mostly returns IOS or old results.

Note: I don't want to force the compilation to 10.8. And I don't necessarily want to link external libraries like GLFW.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1042

Answers (1)

Jay
Jay

Reputation: 6638

You might want to check out SceneKit if you can use 10.9+. It's a native Cocoa framework specifically designed for dealing with 3D rendering.

From the docs:

'Scene Kit is a 3D-rendering Objective-C framework that combines a high-performance rendering engine with a high-level, descriptive API. Scene Kit supports the import, manipulation, and rendering of 3D assets without requiring the exact steps to render a scene the way OpenGL does.'

In particular the SCNSphere class is what you'll be looking for.

And here's a nice scene kit intro by Big Nerd Ranch:
SceneKit in Mountain Lion

However, one thing to consider is that you'll end up with code that is not portable to other platforms as SceneKit is native to OS X (and eventually iOS). Frameworks like OpenGL, Ogre, Irrlicht on the other hand support many different desktop and mobile platforms.

Upvotes: 1

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