Some newbie texture mapping questions

I have written some terrain code (will hopefully become an open source railroad simulator) and now want to add some skin to it.

I used triangle strips to render the height maps but from what I’ve read you have to use four points when specifying texture co-ordinates.

What will OpenGL do when I map a bit of texture over two triangles in a rectangular shape? Will it automatically bend the texture if the vertices are not in the same plane?

Also why do I have to render triangles (or quads for that matter) when I’m already defining a texture in 3D? Does OpenGL actually use the primitives underneath or does it just need the vertices which happen to be defined by the primitive shapes?

Thanks
Paul

your question is a 'lil hard to understand but i’ll do my best.So let’s begin.First there is no difference between texturing triangles,triangle strips/fans or quads.You just have to provide right texture coordinates.

Have you tried lighting your scene yet? You’ll have to define normals for each vertex on your terrain. To do this, average the normals for the 8 surrounding triangles. Find the normal for each of these triangles by using the cross product formula. Make sure your normals are normalised!

For textures, if you have a single texture you would like to place over your terrain, just scale the texture coordinates to the appropriate value. Let’s say your terrain was square and it went from 0 to 1 (in the x and z axes), and there were 64x64 vertices. Then the texture coordinate for the (i,j) vertex would be:

glTexCoord2f(i/63, j/63); // i,j goes from 0 to 63

Ok let me put one of my questions this way :

If you have a wall built from a quad in an OpenGL scene and you texture it do you still need to define the wall?

Why can’t I just “hang up” the paint using co-ords and forget about the wall because you can’t see it anyway.
Is there any point in OpenGL rendering primitives underneath a texture that will never be seen?

Hope that makes more sense.
Paul

Hey you can´t just forget the wall , remember OpenGL is still a rasterizer ,you need to send the vertex coordinates of a polygon and the texture coordinates so then it will transform in screen coordinates

The texture is just a decal ( which may be modulated with other colors , textures and stuff…or not) what you´re really rendering is the geometry …

hope this make any sense

[This message has been edited by raverbach (edited 04-14-2003).]

Thanks, that makes more sense to me now.