Building Android UIs with Custom Views

Rendering text

As we have just mentioned, to render text, we can't just call a drawText method that will render some text in 3D inside our small 3D scene. Actually, we'd be using drawText, but just to render it on a background Bitmap that would be used as a texture for an additional plane we will be rendering.

In order to do so, we'd have to define the geometry of that plane:

private float planeCoords[] = { 
        -1.f, -1.f, -1.4f, 
        -1.f,  1.f, -1.4f, 
         1.f,  1.f, -1.4f, 
         1.f, -1.f, -1.4f, 
}; 
 
private short[] planeIndex = { 
        0, 1, 2, 
        0, 2, 3 
}; 
 
private float texCoords[] = { 
        1.f, 1.f, 
        1.f, 0.f, 
        0.f, 0.f, 
        0.f, 1.f 
}; 

As the cube front face is at z-coordinate -1.f, this plane will be at -1.4f, so 0.4f in front of it, otherwise it might get occluded by the ...