Thread: is there a way to do this on C++?

Originally Posted by Ynot

Ninja's probably the best person to speak to
I hardly ever deal with graphics

Yay, my first plug.

Yes, however you don't want to do the rendering in C++, you want to let the graphics card do it for you. The number of vertices on screen at any given time in most renders is in the thousands and all of those calculations would take ages to do in software.

The best way to talk to your graphics card is OpenGL. Unfortunately, OpenGL has no standard file format and has no file loaders. They were supposed to in 3.0, but it didn't happen, so for a beginner, DirectX might be better.

I'll stick with OpenGL because that's what I know. You need to load your file in, the obj file is easiest, but they're all pretty similar, and put in in a Vertex Array. This is what OpenGL uses to render things.

Google NeHe, those guys have a lot of great OpenGL tutorials.
The steps that are required for your situation is this:

Set up your OpenGL canvas (GLUT is the standard, but 12 years old.)
Turn on texturing, lighting, and other effects that you want
Load your data
Set up your camera (glProjection is the mode that you want)
Position your camera
Render