3D Text… Even Easier!
Alas, text again.
That ok though… I like type, and I would really like to make it easy to do 3D geometric type in opengl. So this week in GL Art I made another stab at fonts in 3D. Initially I wanted to automate the entire process of getting the font file into opengl, but I hit a wall when it came to making triangles out of the font outlines. I’m sure there is something out there that would help with that bit, but I don’t know it, so I moved on. The next best thing I could think of was to make a glyph map in Blender and render all the ascii printable characters into one large obj file. Then, bring that mesh into lwjgl and sub-sample it to get individual display lists of each character.
And yay! I got it to work. I not have control of 91 individual meshes that correspond to ascii characters, even the crazy characters like the ‘ ~ ‘ or ‘ ` ‘.
HERE is the source, mostly from Mark Napier, but modified by me.