OpenGL glMatrixMode help

Question

I'm starting to work a little on OpenGL stuff, and I'm seeing a lot of examples that make calls to the glMatrixMode function.

From what I've gathered, setting this to either GL_MODELVIEW or GL_PROJECTION (etc) will activate that specific transformation matrix and all subsequent calls to matrix transformation functions (glTranslatef, glPushMatrix, glLoadIdentity, glLoadMatrix etc) will affect the active matrix only.

What I don't get is why are there 3 (4 in some cases) different matrices? Which one should I use? (I'm probably going to get a lot of "Use Shaders", but I can't. Limited by school...) When should I switch and activate a different matrix? What is the benefit of utilizing all of them as opposed to only using one?

Thanks for any help :)

Answer 1

glMatrixMode doesn't "activate" matrices. The OpenGL fixed pipeline uses 3 matrices (sometimes 4): Two are responsible for transforming the geometry, one for transforming texture space (and some implementations one for color adjustments). Those matrices are used all the time.

The modelview matrix is used to move geoemtry around. Since OpenGL doesn't have a "camera" the viewer is positioned by moving all the geometry in the opposite (=inverse) of the movements of the "camera".

The projection matrix is used to transform the geometry from modelview space into clip space, i.e. it projects the transformed geometry into the viewport.

The texture matrix transforms the texture coordinates. In case (s,t,r,q) are directly given the benefit of this matrix isn't clear at first. But OpenGL also allows to generate texture coordinates from the vertex positions. This together with the texture matrix allows to implement projection textures.

The color matrix is seldomly used and not even available in all implementations (it's part of an extension). If available it transforms the incoming vertex colours. Since there are not implicit color generators what use is then? Well, it can be used to transform between linear colourspaces, e.g. RGB->XYZ or any other colour space conversion that can be expressed as a matrix of scalars. Nobody used the color matrix these days, shaders do the job much better.

glMatrixMode is there so that there's no bloat of functions. Otherwise you'd need:

glModelviewLoadIdentity
glModelviewLoadMatrix
glModelviewMultMatrix
glModelviewRotate
glModelviewTranslate
glModelviewScale
glModelviewPushMatrix
glModelviewPopMatrix

glProjectionLoadIdentity
glProjectionLoadMatrix
glProjectonMultMatrix
glProjectionRotate
glProjectionTranslate
glProjectionScale
glProjectionPushMatrix
glProjectionPopMatrix

and so on. Also you couldn't use functions like glFrutum in both projection and texture matrices. You'd need two of those, too.

And last but not least one important hint. Setting the viewport and the projection matrix belongs in the rendering function. Most tutorials you'll see out there place them in the window resizing handler, which is the totally wrong place for that. Don't immitate this bad habit.