drawing in different buffers

OpenGL OpenGL: Advanced Coding
1

I am trying to draw a circuit board and need to display separate circuit diagrams on to of eachother. what Opengl buffer can i use to do that.

2

You want to see a multilayer circuit in one pic?
Enable depth buffer and give z-coordinates to the vertices as well. Or do you want it to be semi transparent?

3

Easiest way would be to capture the rendering of each separate circuit in a Display List, and in your main rendering function, just have something like:

…
if( bln_Circuit1Visible )
{
glCallList(CIRCUIT_1_LIST);
}
if( bln_Cuircuit2Visible )
{
glCallList(CIRCUIT_2_LIST);
}
…

etc

This way, you can toggle the visibility of each circuit, or render them with different colours, or blending effects, or whatever.

Hope that helped

4

It all depends on whether you want to draw the layers with geometry or texture.

In either case you can probably just disable depth testing entirely and draw back to front.

Of course, you’ll want to use environment mapping on all the shiny stuff to make it look kewl. (just like the Principles of Shading demo on our web site)

  • Matt
5

That sounds like Kai from Kais Powertools, Matt!

Looked into Eagle (my father uses that). You want graphics like that?

6

Huh? What’s this about Kai’s Power Tools?

  • Matt
7

Well, Kai (he’s a german guy) had always good ideas of features to implement in his programs. But he also always wanted the program to be usable by “normal” users. That’s why he implemented curved coloured lit (…) buttons, smooth gui indeed. That way it looked like a kid-game… Well, it was just a little joke.

8

Originally posted by Michael Steinberg:
You want to see a multilayer circuit in one pic?
Enable depth buffer and give z-coordinates to the vertices as well. Or do you want it to be semi transparent?

Yes I want to have semi transparent.
I am trying not to redraw the entire seen each time i zoom in or out.