OpenGLContext-full

OpenGLContext-full is an excellent learning environment for PyOpenGL, which is specially designed to provide sample code for different scenarios. The software can render common scenegraph objects including geometry such as point-sets, indexed line-sets, indexed face-sets, polygonal text, trimmed NURBs, and particle systems, along with materials and textures, which encompass mip-mapping, multi-texturing. It also has the capability to load data from disk with PIL. The software further provides for transforms which allow for manual calculation of forward and reverse transformation matrices, backgrounds such as solid-colour, spherical and image-cube, and lighting.

One of the notable features of OpenGLContext-full is the support it offers for glBlend-based transparent-geometry rendering, glSelectBuffer-based mouse selection and interaction, and Frustum culling. The software provides hierarchic axis-aligned bounding boxes, frustum extraction from the combined model-view matrix, and preliminary glStencilBuffer-based shadow rendering for greater visual impact. The software can also be used for tessellating polygons.

The software caters to the beginning OpenGL programmer and provides several useful features such as simple 3D navigation options in the form of camera manipulation, fly and examine modes, and an optional VRML97 loader. The scenegraph engine derives inspiration from VRML97. The software also comes with timer mechanisms and simple event handling capabilities.

Finally, OpenGLContext-full provides flexibility with interchangeable context classes that support multiple GUI libraries such as wxPython, PyGame, and GLUT.