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Text on a surface

Started by Lightness Jul 17, 2008 at 6:42 PM 1 replies 750+ views

Original Post

Jul 17, 2008 at 6:42 PM

I'm looking for a way to render text on the surface of an object. In particular I'm just making a bunch of signs and they need to have text that give directions. First, a little about what my project is being made with: I'm using Visual Studio 2005, C++, OpenGL and GLUT... and I'm working on Vista *shudders* My first idea for this was to use glutStrokeCharacter, but I've determined this can't be the best solution. It's slow (although probably wouldn't be a problem) and it would be hard to get everything lined up nicely on multiple signs. As a result, I started looking around the internet for different solutions. I found an article by Mark Kilgard, which sounds like it's pertaining to what I want: http://www.opengl.org/resources/code/samples/mjktips/TexFont/TexFont.html Next I found FTGL, although I could never get it to compile. Simply due to my inexperience with that kind of thing. Lastly, I found glFont by Brad Fish. This seemed to be something good, he even mentioned Mark Kilgard's article on his website. However, I'm not convinced this is actually what I want to do. Every example program I have seen on it was using an orthographic projection and wasn't on the surface of a 3d object. I've finally decided to come to these forums in an attempt to find some help, perhaps just to get pointed in the right direction. What would be the easiest way to do what I'm trying to do?

Lord_Evil

Jul 18, 2008 at 1:14 AM

For 3D text I create a texture mapped font and draw the characters as sprites.
You also could render the text to a texture if it doesn't change that often and either draw a quad with that texture over the sign or draw directly to the sign's texture.

Lightness

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Lightness

Jul 20, 2008 at 11:27 AM

Thanks, I think I'll end up going with rendering the text to a texture. I've found a NeHe lesson on it and that looks to be the best solution. I have a bunch of repeating words, so I will render each word separately and then put the multiple textures on the signs.

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