Animating a texture across a surface in OpenGL

Question

I'm working with the iPhone OpenGLES implementation and I wish to endlessly scroll a texture across a simple surface (two triangles making up a rectangle). This should be straightforward, but it's not something I've done before and I must be missing something. I can rotate the texture fine, but translate does not work at all. Do I have a minor implementation issue or am I doing something fundamentally wrong?

 // move texture
 glMatrixMode(GL_TEXTURE);
 glPushMatrix();
 glLoadIdentity();

    // increment offset - no reset for demo purposes
 wallOffset += 1.0;

    // move the texture - this does not work
 glTranslatef(wallOffset,wallOffset,0.0);

    // rotate the texture - this does work
 //glRotatef(wallOffset, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0);

 glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);

 glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, WallTexture.name);
 glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, coordinates);

 // simple drawing code
 glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, 0, normals);
 glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, vertices);
 glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 0, 4);

    // push matrix back
 glMatrixMode(GL_TEXTURE);
 glPopMatrix();
 glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);

Jesse Beder Jesse Beder · Accepted Answer · 2009-05-24T19:43:23

You're incrementing your texture offset by 1.0f; but textures coordinates are considered in the range [0, 1], so you're not actually changing the texture coordinates (assuming you've enabled some sort of wrapping).

Try changing that increment (try .01f, or maybe something depending on the framerate) and see if it works. If not, then it may have something to do with the texture parameters you've got enabled.

Animating a texture across a surface in OpenGL

1 Answers