OpenGL - have object follow mouse
- by kevin james
I want to have an object follow around my mouse on the screen in OpenGL. (I am also using GLEW, GLFW, and GLM). The best idea I've come up with is:
Get the coordinates within the window with glfwGetCursorPos.
The window was created with
window = glfwCreateWindow( 1024, 768, "Test", NULL, NULL);
and the code to get coordinates is
double xpos, ypos;
glfwGetCursorPos(window, &xpos, &ypos);
Next, I use GLM unproject, to get the coordinates in "object space"
glm::vec4 viewport = glm::vec4(0.0f, 0.0f, 1024.0f, 768.0f);
glm::vec3 pos = glm::vec3(xpos, ypos, 0.0f);
glm::vec3 un = glm::unProject(pos, View*Model, Projection, viewport);
There are two potential problems I can already see. The viewport is fine, as the initial x,y, coordinates of the lower left are indeed 0,0, and it's indeed a 1024*768 window. However, the position vector I create doesn't seem right. The Z coordinate should probably not be zero. However, glfwGetCursorPos returns 2D coordinates, and I don't know how to go from there to the 3D window coordinates, especially since I am not sure what the 3rd dimension of the window coordinates even means (since computer screens are 2D). Then, I am not sure if I am using unproject correctly. Assume the View, Model, Projection matrices are all OK. If I passed in the correct position vector in Window coordinates, does the unproject call give me the coordinates in Object coordinates? I think it does, but the documentation is not clear.
Finally, to each vertex of the object I want to follow the mouse around, I just increment the x coordinate by un[0], the y coordinate by -un[1], and the z coordinate by un[2]. However, since my position vector that is being unprojected is likely wrong, this is not giving good results; the object does move as my mouse moves, but it is offset quite a bit (i.e. moving the mouse a lot doesn't move the object that much, and the z coordinate is very large). I actually found that the z coordinate un[2] is always the same value no matter where my mouse is, probably because the position vector I pass into unproject always has a value of 0.0 for z.
Edit: The (incorrectly) unprojected x-values range from about -0.552 to 0.552, and the y-values from about -0.411 to 0.411.
