How to use opengl to create cylinder effect

Question

Hi,

i am new to opengl, I would like to know how to create 'cylinder effect', like the top site feature in safari 4, here is a picture

http://www.macworld.com/article/139022/2009/02/safari4firstlook.html

Can you please tell me what should i learn , how to get started?

Answer 1

I would start by working through the OpenGL tutorials on NeHe's website. You might also want to invest in the Red Book. Topics you'll be interested in: Geometry and texture mapping. I think NeHe even has an example of texture mapping on a cylinder.

Depending on what you hope to accomplish, you might be able to use the Visualization Toolkit to draw a texture on a cylinder in 100 lines of code or less. There's a bit of a learning curve to VTK (and OpenGL for that matter), but the vtkTextureMapToCylinder class and the TCL example of how to use it are good places to get started.