a polygon drawing problem

OpenGL OpenGL: Basic Coding
1

I have encountered a strange problem when I was drawing a polygon having 7 vertices. The problem is that when one of the interior angle of the polygon is greater than 180 degrees, the polygon is not correctly drawn at that vertex. The code which I used to draw polygon is below;

glBegin(GL_POLYGON);
glVertex3f(-22.60,0,0);
glVertex3f(-22.60,0,40.49);
glVertex3f(-50,0,40.49);
glVertex3f(-50,0,100);
glVertex3f(50,0,100);
glVertex3f(50,0,27.80);
glVertex3f(24.57,0,0);
glEnd();
The second vertex causes this problem.

Does it mean that I always have to draw polygons that have interior angles smaller than 180 degrees?
If so, is there another way to draw these kind of polygons?

2

Yes, as far as I’m aware, OGL requires your polygons to be convex, not concave. Any angle over 180 would make a polygon concave.

You can easily overcome this simply by splitting your polygons down into smaller triangles. That way, they’ll all be convex.

Dan.

3

kazmalak,
You may try tessellator in GLU library.
Please look at OpenGL FAQ 4.040 .

GLU provides tessellation routines to let you render concave polygons, self-intersecting polygons, and polygons with holes.