Difference between rotating object and rotaing viewport?

Hi I’m a newbie at OpenGL and I’m sort of confused about rotating objects. I want a circle to fly 3D space, with boundaries at certain areas of ‘space’. I want to be able to move the mouse and as a result, the view of the everything will change. I want a circle to move around independently of the viewing camera, and be able to zoom in to anthing with the left and right mosue buttons.

Does any one have any ideas on where to start? Which function controls the location of the object, and which function control the direction the camera is pointed in? How do I get the mouse involved to control the direction of the camera is pointing? And, how at the same time, indpendent from the camera view, can I move an object?

Thanks…my email address is ian.michel@uconn.edu and can you email me with suggestions there. Thanks!!!

-Ian

Well that is a tricky question.

Do i rotate the world?
Do i rotate the objects?

Its the same as far as i have understand.

Opengl provides a function called gluLookAt which takes as parameters the position of the camera and the point it points to.

So a good practice is to set up your world and have the camera flying around.