I have had a massive improvement from the last blog post, this is due to the fact that as soon as I finished one task in my mind I had the next lined up. The stage that it is currently at is to be able to render fully textured models with multiple meshes. This is shown in the image below:

I am actually going to rename this project now as it is no longer just a mesh loader, it is essentially the makings of a fully blown renderer. The main reason for this is due to the design I have implemented which allows for flexibility, re-usability and is generally pretty awesome. I will be putting the design diagram on here at some point as I know it will be helpful for other people to see a very basic renderer design. For now here is a list of extra classes that have been implemented:

• OpenGLWindow
• Camera
• Material
• Texture
• TextureManager
• BufferObject( Interface )
• ElementBufferObject
• VertexBufferObject
• VertexArrayObject
• Shader
• ShaderProgram
• RenderMethod( Interface )
• RMPlainTexture
• RenderMethodManager

So there has been a massive difference between last blog post, the next few things that I want to be getting done are mostly finishing off the mesh loader( ensuring all material cases are handled ) and adding lighting.

Peace Out :)

Okay so I've started the initial workings of the model loader and managed to import a simple cube model using Assimp. This is all put into Mesh and Submesh classes which is then used for the render code. You can see the cube in the image on the left.


There are still many mesh features that need implementing. Currently only the vertices and the face indices have been used to create this cube and the colour is set as a uniform variable in the shader. The next step is to gradually add more information from the mesh files such as: normals, textures, colour( ambient, diffuse and specular ) and eventually animation information. Hopefully it won't be long before I have something that I could potentially create a game with. I already have a simple Camera class and a window class for initialising the OpenGL and handling the render loop. 

The next thing I will be focusing on is adding the colours and normals from a mesh file so that it can be used for lighting calculations. I also need to wrap up how the mesh and submesh classes create and communicate with the OpenGL data, i.e. the VBO's EBO's and the VAO. This will take some great deal of thought.

Till next time :)