Texturing in OpenGL

OpenGL allows us to map an image (also referred to as a texture) to a 3D shape or polygon. This process is also called texture mapping. Qt 6 appears to be the best combination with OpenGL in this case because it provides an easy way to load images that belong to one of the common formats (BMP, JPEG, PNG, TARGA, TIFF, and so on), and you do not have to implement it by yourself. We will use the previous example with a spinning cube and try to map it with a texture!

How to do it…

Let’s follow these steps to learn how to use textures in OpenGL:

1. Open up renderwindow.h and add the variables that are highlighted in the following code block:

       QOpenGLContext* openGLContext;
       QOpenGLFunctions* openGLFunctions;
       QOpenGLShaderProgram* shaderProgram;
       QOpenGLVertexArrayObject* vao;
       QOpenGLBuffer* vbo_vertices;
       ...