Reinventing the wheel

I have built a small 3D scanner where the object is illuminated by a laser on a rotating table and the successive camera frames should enable me to strip out the points along the line of light and build a point cloud. I am thinking I can use Visual C++ Version 6 and Open GL to write software which will enable me to build a virtual image from the point cloud, shade it nicely, and rotate it about any axis, zoom etc.

Whilst I have some grasp of the necessary maths, I confess I am a total beginner, both with C++ and Opel GL. As I would like to complete the project some time this century, I am wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of chunks of code in the public domain? I am sure lots of people have done something similar before. Thanks for any advice you can give me! Adrian

You can do this, but if all you want to do is visualise your data why not just parse the data to something like vrml? You don;t need to worry about lighting, windowing, rotating etc the scene

Hi !

Code wouldn’t do you much good if you don’t know C++ and OpenGL anyway, unless of course you can find code that is complete enough so that you don’t need to change it.

I don’t know of any software that would do the whole thing for you, but it’s not very tricky to do with OpenGL…

Mikael