OpenGL ES 2 for Android

Chapter 8Building Simple Objects

We’ve come a long way with our air hockey project: our table is now at a good angle, and it looks better now that we have a texture. However, our mallets don’t actually look anything like a real mallet, since we’re currently drawing each one as a point. Could you imagine playing air hockey with a small dot as a mallet? Many applications combine simple shapes to build up more complicated objects, and we’ll learn how to do that here so we can build a better mallet.

We’re also missing an easy way to pan, rotate, and move around in the scene. Many 3D applications implement this by using a view matrix; changes made to this matrix affect the entire scene, as if we were looking at things from a moving camera. We’ll ...