Whats the point of quadrics

I don’t understand quadrics. To me they basically look like more complex versions of objects like glutSolidSphere or glutSolidTorus. What is a reason for having them? Is there a way to make your own objects?

Quadic is a part of the glu library, allways shipped with opengl, and glut is a standalone library for crossplatform opengl initialization.

And yes, you can do objects yourself, i think most people do, the glut ones and quadric are mainly used for test purposes ( atleast for me)

Quadrics aren’t anything super special…atleast i don’t think they are. They are just more complex objects created for you, so it saves you work. I believe everything in the glu library can be done using standart gl core. But, the glu library provides procedures to speed up the application development process. An example is gluLookAt(…). I’m sure you don’t HAVE to use it, but the alternative is probably a LOT messier and a lot worse to code. I’m not sure, but i think GLUT just wraps quadrics into the glutSphere(…), glutCube(…), etc.

Yes glu objects are more complexe, while glut objects are very limited.
If you have a simple idea to get accross, Glut objects come in handy for programming ideas or examples in a fast way.
Glu add’s texture coords, that the glut objects don’t have.
And sometimes if you just want a basic object like a sphere or cyclinder glu keeps you from having to create these basic objects from scratch.

Of course you can make your own objects, by using display list.

Originally posted by mdog1234:
I don’t understand quadrics. To me they basically look like more complex versions of objects like glutSolidSphere or glutSolidTorus. What is a reason for having them? Is there a way to make your own objects?

Quadrics could be handy “sometimes”, but most of the time you’ll be working with things like 3ds anyways.