Drawing Mesh

its not 100% clear what u want
eg possible solutions
A/ use various glDepthRanges(..)
B/ clear the depth buffer before u draw the mesh
C/ use polygon offset

I'm still somewhat new to OpenGL.

Basically I want to draw the wire mesh on top of the polygons being rendered. If I just draw the wireframe as usual, it gets variously obscured by by the poly mesh, resulting in a dulled wireframe that's not as distinct as I'd like.

Like you can show in a modeller such as Maya.

If you're having the same problem that I did, I could draw plain wireframes ok, but if I drew them with a colored solid and then a wireframe, the wireframe wouldn't look right with depth testing on. Try this before you draw your solid version.

glPolygonMode(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_FILL);
glEnable(GL_POLYGON_OFFSET_FILL);
glPolygonOffset(1.0, 1.0);

That should take care of your problem. The seeing through the meshes problem you are talking about can be fixed with a call to glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE); Opengl defaults to counter clockwise wound polygons, and will not draw clockwise wound polygons(the back facing ones) with this option enabled. But I'm guessing your overall scene is going to need depth testing on at some point.

Your first fix is definately an improvement. What exactly is it doing :P?

It's telling opengl that when you draw the filled polygon and it's time to update the depth buffer, that instead of putting the actual depth of the polygon it uses an offset of one more depth unit than it normally would. Then when you just draw the lines for the wireframe which would normally have the same depth values as the filled polygon(but now they don't since you used offset fill) they now appear how they should. Make sure you disable offset fill when your done using it too.

Here's where I originally learned to do it, click here, it's from the Red Book, you should definitely check it out.

[Edited by - Disgruntled Gamer on May 22, 2006 3:58:04 PM]