Automatically calculate normals in GLKit/OpenGL-ES

Question

I'm making some fairly basic shapes in OpenGL-ES based on sample code from Apple. They've used an array of points, with an array of indices into the first array and each set of three indices creates a polygon. That's all great, I can make the shapes I want. To shade the shapes correctly I believe I need to calculate normals for each vertex on each polygon. At first the shapes were cuboidal so it was very easy, but now I'm making (slightly) more advanced shapes I want to create those normals automatically. It seems easy enough if I get vectors for two edges of a polygon (all polys are triangles here) and use their cross product for every vertex on that polygon. After that I use code like below to draw the shape.

glEnableVertexAttribArray(GLKVertexAttribPosition);
glVertexAttribPointer(GLKVertexAttribPosition, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, triangleVertices);

glEnableVertexAttribArray(GLKVertexAttribColor);
glVertexAttribPointer(GLKVertexAttribColor, 4, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, triangleColours);

glEnableVertexAttribArray(GLKVertexAttribNormal);
glVertexAttribPointer(GLKVertexAttribNormal, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, triangleNormals);

glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 48);

glDisableVertexAttribArray(GLKVertexAttribPosition);
glDisableVertexAttribArray(GLKVertexAttribColor);
glDisableVertexAttribArray(GLKVertexAttribNormal);

What I'm having trouble understanding is why I have to do this manually. I'm sure there are cases when you'd want something other than just a vector perpendicular to the surface, but I'm also sure that this is the most popular use case by far, so shouldn't there be an easier way? Have I missed something obvious? glCalculateNormals() would be great.

//And here is an answer Pass in a GLKVector3[] that you wish to be filled with your normals, another with the vertices (each three are grouped into polygons) and then the count of the vertices.

- (void) calculateSurfaceNormals: (GLKVector3 *) normals forVertices: (GLKVector3 *)incomingVertices count:(int) numOfVertices
{

    for(int i = 0; i < numOfVertices; i+=3)
    {
        GLKVector3 vector1 = GLKVector3Subtract(incomingVertices[i+1],incomingVertices[i]);
        GLKVector3 vector2 = GLKVector3Subtract(incomingVertices[i+2],incomingVertices[i]);        
        GLKVector3 normal = GLKVector3Normalize(GLKVector3CrossProduct(vector1, vector2));
        normals[i] = normal;
        normals[i+1] = normal;
        normals[i+2] = normal;
    }
}

Answer 1

And again the answer is: OpenGL is neither a scene managment library nor a geometry library, but just a drawing API that draws nice pictures to the screen. For lighting it needs normals and you give it the normals. That's all. Why should it compute normals if this can just be done by the user and has nothing to do with the actual drawing?

Often you don't compute them at runtime anyway, but load them from a file. And there are many many ways to compute normals. Do you want per-face normals or per-vertex normals? Do you need any specific hard edges or any specific smooth patches? If you want to average face normals to get vertex normals, how do you want to average these?

And with the advent of shaders and the removing of the builtin normal attribute and lighting computations in newer OpenGL versions, this whole question becomes obsolete anyway as you can do lighting any way you want and don't neccessarily need traditional normals anymore.

By the way, it sounds like at the moment you are using per-face normals, which means every vertex of a face has the same normal. This creates a very faceted model with hard edges and also doesn't work very well together with indices. If you want a smooth model (I don't know, maybe you really want a faceted look), you should average the face normals of the adjacent faces for each vertex to compute per-vertex normals. That would actually be the more usual use-case and not per-face normals.

So you can do something like this pseudo-code:

for each vertex normal:
    intialize to zero vector

for each face:
    compute face normal using cross product
    add face normal to each vertex normal of this face

for each vertex normal:
    normalize

to generate smooth per-vertex normals. Even in actual code this should result in something between 10 and 20 lines of code, which isn't really complex.