Development Guide Library

An Alternative to gluPerspective by Dranith

Motive

gluPerspective is a very very handy function for setting up the projection matrix. The only problem it has that I see is the FOV it takes is the FOV in the Y direction. So either you have no control over the FOV in the X direction, or you have the source to gluPerspective and you do some fancy trig to figure out the Y FOV value you need to input to get the desired X FOV.

Both these ways suck. So heres the code that lets you specify the FOV in the X direction. Code is based off the MESA implementation of gluPerspective.

Not to mention this is a point of confusion for people new to OpenGL. I didn't even notice that it took the Y FOV till a few days ago when I was doing something that I needed to be able to specify in X and things weren't working =).

Code

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void gldPerspective(GLdouble fovx, GLdouble aspect, GLdouble zNear, GLdouble zFar) {    // This code is based off the MESA source for gluPerspective    // *NOTE* This assumes GL_PROJECTION is the current matrix       GLdouble xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax;    GLdouble m[16] = {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0};    xmax = zNear * tan(fovx * M_PI / 360.0);    xmin = -xmax;       ymin = xmin / aspect;    ymax = xmax / aspect;    // Set up the projection matrix    M(0,0) = (2.0 * zNear) / (xmax - xmin);    M(1,1) = (2.0 * zNear) / (ymax - ymin);    M(2,2) = -(zFar + zNear) / (zFar - zNear);    M(0,2) = (xmax + xmin) / (xmax - xmin);    M(1,2) = (ymax + ymin) / (ymax - ymin);    M(3,2) = -1.0;    M(2,3) = -(2.0 * zFar * zNear) / (zFar - zNear);       // Add to current matrix    glMultMatrixd(m); }

Notes

Usage syntax is exactly the same as gluPerspective. This function assumes that GL_PROJECTION is the current matrix. This code is not optimised at all, but should only need to be called once.

--Dranith