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3D Solar System With Opengl and C#

This document summarizes a 3D solar system project created with OpenGL and C#. The project contains classes for planets, satellites, stars, and the sun that are contained in a SolarSystem class. A camera class allows first-person viewpoint movement. The 3D content is rendered in a Windows form using a timer to draw over 30 frames per second. Key classes include Planet for rendering orbiting spheres, Satellite for moons, and Star for random points. The goal is to provide a simple educational demo of a 3D solar system.

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Shylaja G
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197 views4 pages

3D Solar System With Opengl and C#

This document summarizes a 3D solar system project created with OpenGL and C#. The project contains classes for planets, satellites, stars, and the sun that are contained in a SolarSystem class. A camera class allows first-person viewpoint movement. The 3D content is rendered in a Windows form using a timer to draw over 30 frames per second. Key classes include Planet for rendering orbiting spheres, Satellite for moons, and Star for random points. The goal is to provide a simple educational demo of a 3D solar system.

Uploaded by

Shylaja G
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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3D solar system with Opengl and C#

Hello this is a 3D solar system implementation with OpenGL and C#. I tried to keep it simple
because this demo it’s only for educational purposes. It contains the sun, the planets, our
moon, the planet’s orbit and some stars. It is programmed in Visual Studio 2008 and I have
upgraded it to Visual Studio 2010 without any kind of issue. I used for this demo the TAO
namespace which it’s an interop between the opengl dll and the .Net Framework. I also used
Shadowengine, a small graphic framework developed by me to get rid you of the tedium of
hard coding the loading of textures, the initialization of the graphic context among others. Well
let’s dive into the project.

The project contains the following classes which I will explain briefly what they do and how.

As you can see in the project, references to ShadowEngine


and TAO.OpenGL. I will like to point out that I don’t create
a graphic context in a standalone window Like XNA, GLUT,
ETC. My graphic context it’s created in a common .NET win
form. This is very convenient because you can draw 3D
content in any window mixing it with 2D components. Later
on you will see that you can draw 3D content in almost any
2D component. The OpenGl initialization function only
needs a valid component handler to start drawing 3D.
Here is the list of the project classes:

Camara.cs

This is a classic FPS (First Person Shooter) camera. The explanation of how a FPS works goes
beyond the scope of this article. They work the following way:

 The mouse it’s centered on the middle of the screen.


 When the user moves the mouse a delta X and Delta Y are calculated from the
beginning point.
 Those Delta X and Delta Y are translated into angles and how is how the camera it’s
rotated.
 When you wish to move forward or backward the camera will move in the direction
that are the angles pointing.
 You may take a look at public void Update(int pressedButton) at the
camera class to have a better understanding

MainForm.cs

This class name its auto explanatory, it is the main and only form of the project. It contains the
call to the texture loading, the 3D context initialization, the drawing of the 3D content, among
others. It also handles the user key and mouse input. Because the 3D content requires at least
30 frames per second to be drawn I used a timer and placed all the drawing code inside it.

Planet.cs

A planet contains the following variables:

 Position
 Texture
 Orbit(current distance from the sun)
 Current rotation angle
 Current orbit speed

I used OpenGL quadrics to draw the planets sphere. Quadrics are OpenGL predefined shapes
to help in small drawing tasks. In each frame the planet moves through its orbit according to its
orbit speed. Also there is a bool variable called hasMoon to specify if you want to draw a moon
for that planet. I have only our moon but if you like, for example, to draw mars moons Phobos
and Deimos you can use that code. Another interesting function that contains the planet class
is the one used to draw its orbit. First I generate the points with a sin function and then I
connect them using GL_LINE_STRIP. Here is the code:
public void DrawOrbit()
{
Gl.glBegin(Gl.GL_LINE_STRIP);

for (int i = 0; i < 361; i++)


{
Gl.glVertex3f(p.x * (float)Math.Sin(i * Math.PI / 180),
0, p.x * (float)Math.Cos(i * Math.PI / 180));
}
Gl.glEnd();
}

Satellite.cs

A satellite contains everything that a planet does. The only difference is that it’s rotation point
it’s not the sun but the planet that contains it. So anytime it draws it has to receive the
position of its containing planet.

SolarSystem.cs

This is the class that contains the list of planets, stars and satellites. It only create and draw
them.

Star.cs

This is the class the draws the stars. The stars are single GL_POINTS which are generated in
random positions. This is the function that generates them:

public void CreateStars(int amount)


{
Random r = new Random();
int count = 0;

while (count != amount)


{
Position p = default(Position);
p.x = (r.Next(110)) * (float)Math.Pow(-1, r.Next());
p.z = (r.Next(110)) * (float)Math.Pow(-1, r.Next());
p.y = (r.Next(110)) * (float)Math.Pow(-1, r.Next());
if (Math.Pow(Math.Pow(p.x, 2) + Math.Pow(p.y, 2) +
Math.Pow(p.z, 2), 1 / 3f) > 15)
{
stars.Add(p);
count++;
}
}
}

Sun.cs

The sun class is the most simple it’s like the planet class only it has no orbit. It has only a
rotation around its axis.
Last thoughts

Well, these are all the classes involving this project I hope it is useful and that will encourage
developers to start in 3D programming. Feel yourself free to play with the code and to ask any
question you want. If you like this demo you can visit my personal dev blog at
http://vasilydev.blogspot.com.

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