The Walkthru Project GLVU

GLVU is a C++/OpenGL/GLUT based viewer that various members of The Walkthrough Group at UNC CS have been developing to serve as a common platform for our research. We are making it available to you because that's just the kind of people we are. And because we want to assimilate you.

GLVU Source Downloads

Browse the list of versions available.
Archives are named according to the date they were checked out and created.

There are a few different subsets of the glvu source:

• glvu_core_* is just the basic stuff you need to make a 3D app.
  This contains only the code for the standard viewer (mouse interaction, camera control, etc.)
• qglvu_core_* is the same a glvu_core but the Qt 2.3 version rather than GLUT version.
  
• glvu_all_* is the full GLVU
  This contains the standard GLVU package and all the extension modules (most of which you will have absolutely no use for. Guaranteed.)

What's Inside?

Rather than being one massive "3D Engine", GLVU provides a number of utility libraries that are handy to have for 3D graphics programming with OpenGL. Basically we have no idea what you're going to try to do with OpenGL, and we don't want to limit you. So you can use all these components together, or just take bits and pieces that do what you need. Here are the main pieces it has:

• The viewer (glvu/glvu or glvu/qglvu subdirectory). The viewer allows you to create GL windows easily and includes a number of routines for turning keyboard and mouse input into 3D navigation.
• Math libs (glvu/math,glvu/math_objs). Every 3D toolkit has to come with its own Vector and Matrix classes, why should GLVU be any different? Includes 4x4 matrix, 3x3 matrix, 4-vector, 3-vector, and quaternion classes. Also has routines for operating directly on arrays of floats rather than particular class types. GLVU/math_objs has a few graphics primitive classes like plane, triangle, and axis-aligned bounding boxes, and these provide various routines for things like intersection testing.
• Image libs (glvu/images subdirectory). The image libraries have simple routines for reading and writing a few different image formats (PPM,PGM,TGA,RGB). TGA supports alpha, which is handy.
• Object loading (glvu/object). The object libs give you a way to load a few common 3D file formats. Nothing too sophisticated in terms of material handling, but enough for quickly getting a model with vertex colors and normals loaded up. Support for TRI, OBJ, VRML1, and even some homebrew NURBS format. (Although I don't know if any of those completely support their respective specs -- there's definitely no support for textures, sadly).
• File libs (glvu/fileutils). Some cross-platform routines for searching directories, and manipulating filenames.
• Thread lib (glvu/thread). An OK thread library that works cross-platform.
• Timer class (glvu/timer). Time your code to see how long stuff is taking!
• GL Utilities (glvu/glutils). Handy functions for managing textures and doing framebuffer readback and stuff.
• Other stuff . Various other things that may or may not be useful like a Camera class, environment map class, projective texturing code, and textured depth mesh code. It was all useful to someone at sometime!

Project files and workspaces are included for MSVC 6.0 in the glvu/MSVC6 directory. The directory contains two MSVC workspaces, one builds the GLVU libraries (libs.dsw), the other builds the examples (examples.dsw).

There is also a directory called MSVC5 which has project files for Microsoft Visual C++ version 5.0, but these files are not actively maintained and likely will not work without some tweeking.

We have set up the project files to link GLVU against the "Multithreaded DLL" run-time libraries rather than the default "Single-Threaded" versions. Prior versions of GLVU were configured to use the "Single-Threaded" run-time libraries. The change was made to allow for greater flexibility: it is still possible to write single-threaded programs when linking against the multithreaded run-time libraries, but the opposite is not true. Since there's no real significant disadvantage to using the multithreaded run-time libraries as far as I know, it is better for us to make that the default.

You change the run-time libraries in your projects by going to the "Project Settings" dialog in Visual Studio, to the "C/C++" tab, under the category "Code Generation". There where you see "Use run-time library" change the drop-down to "Multithreaded DLL" for the Release build and "Debug Multithreaded DLL" for the Debug build.

The way I usually use glvu on windows is to compile it in some directory, say c:\usr\pkg\glvu, then set a GLVUDIR environment variable in Windows to that dir. Then in the Project Settings, C/C++ tab, under "Preprocessor" I add $(GLVUDIR)/include, and under the Link tab, under "Input", I add $(GLVUDIR)/lib. Actually I do that for just about every external library I link against, and it works pretty well.

To build, just type gmake (or make if that's what your version of GNU make is called). If it doesn't do what you expect then you should read the README.ubermake file that comes in the distribution.

Note that QGLVU hasn't been tested on UNIX, and probably will require some tweaking, especially in the Makefiles department.

Toolkits

The Qt version of the GLVU viewer, QGLVU, is based off of Qt 2.3, which is also really old at this point. Reports are that QGLVU won't compile with the latest version of Qt (3.3 at the time of this writing). If anyone feels inspired to contribute patches to make it work with 3.3, please do! If you're here at UNC, I (baxter at cs) would be glad to help you get it working.

But the bigger problem is that TrollTech has made Qt free on Linux, but not on Windows. The most recent version of Qt that was freely available on Windows is the 2.3 Non-Commercial version. (which is hard to find on their web site, but still available for dowload here). Apart from that, rumor has it that this book on Qt comes with a non-commercial edition of 3.3, but that seems to only be available to book purchasers at this point.

We have started creaing API documentation for GLVU using doxygen. The results can be browsed here.

You can refer to the older (very incomplete) documentation here. Be prepared for plenty of "missing links".

In the meantime, if there is a question that the manual doesn't answer yet, you can refer to the example programs included in the standard GLVU distribution. These are located in the glvu/examples directory.

last updated: 6 Feb 2004 3:33pm
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