How do I texture a cylinder in OpenGL created with triangle_strip?

Question

Here\'s the cylinder I have created:

void drawCylinder(float r, float g, float b) {
    setMaterialColors(r, g, b);
    glColor4f(r, g, b, 1.0);
    /* top t         


        

Answer 1

It looks like you have a functional solution. But there's a few more things that I think are worth improving compared to the original code, so I still want to provide an alternative. It addresses:

• It's very inefficient, using a lot of sin/cos calls, as well as divisions, which are all fairly expensive. The code below uses one sin, one cos, and a couple of divisions that can be evaluated at compile time. The rest is all additions and multiplications, which are much faster operations.
• The original code uses floating point values for loop control. Since floating point values are inherently imprecise, this will more or less "randomly" result in one more or less iteration, depending on how the rounding happens to work out.
• The original code uses a wild mix of float, double and int types. float is fine for coordinates, there is no need to use slower double precision, with also expensive type casts back to float.

Code (untested, but hopefully close enough to convey the proposed approach):

// Number of segments a circle is divided into.
const unsigned DIV_COUNT = 32;

// Calculate angle increment from point to point, and its cos/sin.
float angInc = 2.0f * M_PI / static_cast(DIV_COUNT);
float cosInc = cos(angInc);
float sinInc = sin(angInc);

// Draw top cap.
glBegin(GL_TRIANGLE_FAN);

glTexCoord2f(0.5f, 0.5f);
glVertex3f(0.0f, height, 0.0f);

glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.5f);
glVertex3f(radius, height, 0.0f);

float xc = 1.0f;
float yc = 0.0f;
for (unsigned iDiv = 1; iDiv < DIV_COUNT; ++iDiv) {
    float xcNew = cosInc * xc - sinInc * yc;
    yc = sinInc * xc + cosInc * yc;
    xc = xcNew;
    glTexCoord2f(0.5f + 0.5f * xc, 0.5f + 0.5f * yc);
    glVertex3f(radius * xc, height, -radius * yc);
}

glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.5f);
glVertex3f(radius, height, 0.0f);

glEnd();

// Draw bottom cap.
glBegin(GL_TRIANGLE_FAN);

glTexCoord2f(0.5f, 0.5f);
glVertex3f(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);

glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.5f);
glVertex3f(radius, 0.0f, 0.0f);

xc = 1.0f;
yc = 0.0f;
for (unsigned iDiv = 1; iDiv < DIV_COUNT; ++iDiv) {
    float xcNew = cosInc * xc - sinInc * yc;
    yc = sinInc * xc + cosInc * yc;
    xc = xcNew;
    glTexCoord2f(0.5f + 0.5f * xc, 0.5f + 0.5f * yc);
    glVertex3f(radius * xc, 0.0f, radius * yc);
}

glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.5f);
glVertex3f(radius, 0.0f, 0.0f);

glEnd();

float texInc = 1.0f / static_cast(DIV_COUNT);

// Draw cylinder.
glBegin(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP);

glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f);
glVertex3f(radius, 0.0f, 0.0f);
glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f);
glVertex3f(radius, height, 0.0f);

xc = 1.0f;
yc = 0.0f;
float texCoord = 0.0f;
for (unsigned iDiv = 1; iDiv < DIV_COUNT; ++iDiv) {
    float xcNew = cosInc * xc - sinInc * yc;
    yc = sinInc * xc + cosInc * yc;
    xc = xcNew;
    texCoord += texInc;
    glTexCoord2f(texCoord, 0.0f);
    glVertex3f(radius * xc, 0.0f, radius * yc);
    glTexCoord2f(texCoord, 1.0f);
    glVertex3f(radius * xc, height, radius * yc);
}

glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f);
glVertex3f(radius, 0.0f, 0.0f);
glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f);
glVertex3f(radius, height, 0.0f);

glEnd();

If you're interested in moving to modern OpenGL, my answer to this question shows how to draw a circle using VBOs: How to draw a circle using VBO in ES2.0.