how to insert jpg/png into scene in opengl?

Question

Is it possible to load an image file into opengl? We are developing a realistic scene of a robot in both linux and VC++.

What libraies and methods are available to insert an image? also link good examples and references.

Answer 1

The general technique is to bind your image to a texture, and apply it to a quad rendered in your scene. You can use any image library to load the image (DevIL is pretty good); and you'll probably need to rescale or pad it to be a square with power-of-two dimension.