I am looking for a lightweight C++ library that will allow me to import an OBJ file with the texture information and then render using OpenGL. Ideally, I would like it to work under Windows and Linux. All the libraries I have found so far seem to be a lot bigger and more complex than seems necessary. Does anyone have any recommendations?
I use OpenSceneGraph to handle all the different 3D file formats: http://www.openscenegraph.org/
I am not directly aware of a lightweight library, but a quick Google search for 'C++ obj loader' gives at least two promising links. I just did not fully investigate if these libraries would be suited for textures. At least they are minimal and only solve the problem of loading obj files.
Since these libraries only load, but do not draw the objects, you need to write your own code around that. My guess is that once loaded you only need to provide an OpenGL context, create some VBOs and write about 5 lines of OpenGL code inside the drawing function. Otherwise you will mostly find libraries that do a lot more, like OpenSceneGraph mentioned before.
https://github.com/syoyo/tinyobjloader
http://www.kixor.net/dev/objloader/
Stephan/Simon
Thank you both for your answers. I was hoping to find something a bit lighter than OSG but having looked at tinyobjloader and objloader, amongst others, I may be being over-hopeful. I think that parsing the file is actually reasonably easy but converting the three sets of indices used to define the vertices, normals and texture map of an obj element into a single set of indices used by OpenGL is a bit trickier. I've found some code to do this but it looks quite slow and messy so I'm tempted to go straight to OSG anyway.
Thanks for the input
Tim
Hi,
You may try the loader presented in the attached files, based on the lightweight loader available in the Nate Robins' OpenGL Tutorial. Let me know if it worked for you.
You should try assimp (http://assimp.sourceforge.net/). It supports plenty of formats beyond wavefront and if you remove the boost dependency (instructions here) http://assimp.sourceforge.net/lib_html/install.html then it's pretty much lightweight.
Assimp doesn't handle all the cases of OBJ. It also doesn't distinguish between windows project's *.obj and the 3D *.obj file formats. You perhaps need to to write your own modified version of OBJ.
https://github.com/Bly7/OBJ-Loader/tree/master/Source
Extra light. Just one .h file. Works fine by me.
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