Lightning in OpenGL with Material Effect

This is second tutorial on Lightning in OpenGL. In this tutorial, I will discuss about producing Material Effect in OpenGL. Material parameters specify how a surface reflects light. Applications change OpenGL material parameters to emulate different colored materials, shiny and flat materials, high gloss materials such as pool ball, etc.
The routine glColor3f(), sets the primary color and is a good idea to call this routine as long as we are not using lighting effects. The OpenGL lighting doesn’t use the primary color, instead uses the material colors. Hence it is important to introduce materials while talking about lighting.

So far we have seen a simple lighting example which has no material effects. But, in order to make the scene more attractive, we have to make use of materials. In the following code, we have used a green material. We make use of GL_SPECULAR, GL_AMBIENT, GL_SHININESS depending on the
scene requirements. The same parameters are also applicable to lighting methods.

Source Code:

#include 

#include 

static double yVal=50.0;

void drawSphere(){

    GLUquadricObj* cyl;

    GLfloat light_position[] = { 0.0, 40.0, yVal, 0.0 };

    glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_POSITION, light_position);

    GLfloat mat_specular[] = { 0.3f, 1.0f, 0.3f, 1.0f }; // Green color material

    GLfloat mat_shininess[] = { 70.0 }; // Defines shininess

    glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT, GL_SPECULAR, mat_specular); // Using materials

    glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT, GL_AMBIENT, mat_specular);

    glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT, GL_SHININESS, mat_shininess);

    glMatrixMode (GL_PROJECTION);

    glLoadIdentity();

    gluPerspective(35.0, 1.0, 1.0, 100.0);

    glMatrixMode (GL_MODELVIEW);

    glLoadIdentity();

    gluLookAt (30.0, 0.0, 10.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);

    cyl = gluNewQuadric();

    gluQuadricDrawStyle(cyl, GLU_FILL);

    gluSphere(cyl, 2.0, 50, 50);

    glFlush();

}

void display(void){

    glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);

    drawSphere();

    glFlush ();

}

void init (void){

    glClearColor (0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.0);

    glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); //enabling z-buffer

    glMatrixMode (GL_PROJECTION);

    glLoadIdentity();

    gluPerspective(35.0, 1.0, 1.0, 100.0);

    glMatrixMode (GL_MODELVIEW);

    glLoadIdentity();

    gluLookAt (30.0, 0.0, 10.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);

    glEnable(GL_LIGHTING);

    glEnable(GL_LIGHT0);

}

void keyboard(unsigned char key, int x, int y){

    switch (key) {

        case 27: // “esc” on keyboard

        exit(0);

        break;

        case 97: // “a” on keyboard

        yVal = yVal-5.0;

        glutPostRedisplay();

        break;

    }

}

int main(int argc, char** argv){

    glutInit(&argc, argv);

    glutInitDisplayMode (GLUT_SINGLE | GLUT_RGB);

    glutInitWindowSize (600, 600);

    glutInitWindowPosition (100, 100);

    glutCreateWindow ("Light Material effect - Programming Techniques");

    init ();

    glutDisplayFunc(display);

    glutKeyboardFunc(keyboard);

    glutMainLoop();

    return 0;

}

Output