This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Basic State Management
In the preceding section, you saw an example of a state variable, the current RGBA color, and how it can be associated with a primitive. OpenGL maintains many states and state variables. An object may be rendered with lighting, texturing, hidden surface removal, fog, and other states affecting its appearance.
By default, most of these states are initially inactive. These states may be costly to activate; for example, turning on texture mapping will almost certainly slow down the process of rendering a primitive. However, the image will improve in quality and will look more realistic, owing to the enhanced graphics capabilities.
To turn many of these states on and off, use these two simple commands:
You can also check whether a state is currently enabled or disabled.
The states you have just seen have two settings: on and off. However, most OpenGL routines set values for more complicated state variables. For example, the routine glColor3f() sets three values, which are part of the GL_CURRENT_COLOR state. There are five querying routines used to find out what values are set for many states:
These querying routines handle most, but not all, requests for obtaining state information. (See “The Query Commands” in Appendix B for a list of all of the available OpenGL state querying routines.)