openglindex-buffer

OpenGL - auto generation of indices / stride parameter for glDrawArrays


I'm rendering a grid-structure with lots of data-points (>1M). The structure of my data is in the picture.

Structure of data-points

So the content of my index buffer looks like this 0, 100, 1, 101, 2, 102, 3, 103, ...

I'm a bit annoyed by the huge size of my index-buffer which I need to define my triangle strip. Is there a possibility to tell OpenGL to generate these indices automatically in the showed way? Or maybe some trick with glVertexAttribPointer I haven't though of?


Solution

  • There is indeed a function for something like this: glDrawElementsBaseVertex

    so you can draw them all with:

    for(int i=0; i < height-1; i++){
        glDrawElementsBaseVertex(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 200, GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0, i*100);
    }
    

    the index buffer is then just: 0, 100, 1, 101, 2, 102, 3, 103,... 98, 198, 99, 199

    With some tweaking you can even use glMultiDrawElementsBaseVertex:

    GLsizei *count = new GLsizei[height-1];
    GLvoid **indices = new GLvoid[height-1];
    GLint *basevertex​ = new GLint[height-1];
    for(int i = 0; i< height-1; i++){
        count[i]=200;
        indices[i]=0;
        basevertex​[i]=i*100;
    }
    glMultiDrawElementsBaseVertex(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, count, indices, height-1, basevertex​);