I can't get GL_SMOOTH to work

I just can't seem to get smooth rendering to work. I am working on Windows NT with Voodoo 3 card with latest drivers installed. I have tried different lighting models, materials etc, but all my polygons look flat. Single colour from edge to edge.

I'd appreciate some ideas please.

[Eric]

Just in case this is a driver issue, you should build a little program which does not use lighting/material but only smooth polygons.

For example, try to draw a triangle with one vertex red, another green and the last one blue. If you do not have a shaded triangle, then it is a driver issue... Before contacting the vendor, post your code for the test here !

You can have a look in the developper section of this site to find glut examples using GL_SMOOTH. If they work, it means that your program is bugged...

Regards.

Eric

[Bob]

Hello

If you are using lighning, the problemt might be that you don't set normals for each vertex, then the whole polygon will look like it's flatshaded, even if you set GL_SMOOTH.

Just a possibility...

Bob

[Marc]

Bob, thats not quite right. If your lightsource is near one vertex, approximatly in the direction of the normal-vector, that vertex becomes lighter while the other vertices remain dark whith a gradient in the polygon.

[Bob]

Ok, maybe you are right about this Marc. What I ment in my post was that PhilD might have the lightsource furhter away (relative to the size), and the polygon looks like it's flatshaded.

Bob

[Marc]

Ok, ok ...

Thanks for your help guys, you've given me some ideas to try. In the meantime, have a look at www.aicom.co.uk/products/volumaid.htm and you'll see what I mean. I think I'm setting the normals OK because the polygons seem to change shade properly according to their direction relative to the light source. But what I was expecting was a rounded edges effect. Perhaps the light source is too far away, perhaps I should use spotlight effects. I'll try different coloured adjacent polygons too.