Filament with GLFW

Filament is an amazing 3D rendering library started by Google. This example shows how to use Filament with GLFW and my feature-get-texture-id branch to use Filament with a shared OpenGL context.

Prerequisites

I assume that you have already setup a development environment on both Linux and Windows. Some tools that you want to install:

• CMake
• Visual Studio 2019

Building on Windows

With the current master branch (2020-06-02) I run into an issue when I try to compile Filament. The paths that some of the dependencies are too long. Currently you have to make sure to clone this repository in e.g. c:\tmp\ which I used while testing. To build this example simply run release.bat from the build directory; this will take care of everything and once compiled you should see something as the image below.

cd c:\
[email protected]:roxlu/filament-with-glfw.git tmp

cd tmp
cd build
release.bat

Building on Linux

In this example I'm building the repository from a tmp dir in your $HOME. Similar to the Windows build I've provided a release.sh file which you can run. Once Filament has been compiled you'll see a something as in the image below.

cd ~/
[email protected]:roxlu/filament-with-glfw.git tmp

cd tmp
cd build
./release.sh

Important

This example uses my feature-get-texture-id which allows you to retrieve the native texture id from a filament::Texture. As this example was created to show how to use a shared OpenGL context it makes sense that we actually use some of the shared resources. See test-shared-gl-context-with-fbo.cpp where we render the scene into a framebuffer and use the FBO texture in our main OpenGL context.

Creating a shared context

• Make sure that your main OpenGL context (e.g. the GLFW one) is not current when you create the Filament::Engine instance and pass the shared context into filament::Engine::create()

• When you pass a shared GL context, make sure to use the filament::Engine::createSwapChain(int width, int height, int flags) version which creates a headless swapchain. Note that there is also a filament::Engine::createSwapChain(void* nativeWindow) version.

• When passing a native window handle, use glfwGetX11Window() and not glfwGetGLXWindow() to retrieve the correct handle. You can directly cast these handles into a void*.