Question

I am having a little trouble getting my VBO to render normals correctly now that I am using indexing. I am pretty sure it is something wrong with my offset for the normal pointer, but the math seems to add up to me.

How I store the data:

struct MyVertex
{
    float x, y, z;        //Vertex
    float nx, ny, nz;     //Normal
};

Below is how I set up the VBO:

GLuint VertexVBOID, IndexVBOID;
glGenBuffers(1, &VertexVBOID);
glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, VertexVBOID);
glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(MyVertex)*NumOfV, &ModelV[0].x, GL_STATIC_DRAW);

glGenBuffers(1, &IndexVBOID);
glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, IndexVBOID);
glBufferData(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(unsigned int)*NumOfF*3, &ModelI[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW);

My render code:

if(UsingVBO == false)
{
    glRotatef(Timer.getElapsedTime().asSeconds() * 10, 0, 1, 0);
    glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES);
        for(int i = 0; i < NumOfF*3; i+=3)
        {
            glNormal3f(ModelV[ModelI[i]].nx, ModelV[ModelI[i]].ny, ModelV[ModelI[i]].nz);
            glVertex3f(ModelV[ModelI[i]].x, ModelV[ModelI[i]].y, ModelV[ModelI[i]].z);

            glNormal3f(ModelV[ModelI[i+1]].nx, ModelV[ModelI[i+1]].ny, ModelV[ModelI[i+1]].nz);
            glVertex3f(ModelV[ModelI[i+1]].x, ModelV[ModelI[i+1]].y, ModelV[ModelI[i+1]].z);

            glNormal3f(ModelV[ModelI[i+2]].nx, ModelV[ModelI[i+2]].ny, ModelV[ModelI[i+2]].nz);
            glVertex3f(ModelV[ModelI[i+2]].x, ModelV[ModelI[i+2]].y, ModelV[ModelI[i+2]].z);
        }
    glEnd();
}
else
{
    glRotatef(Timer.getElapsedTime().asSeconds() * 10, 0, 1, 0);

    glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY);
    glEnableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY);

    glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, VertexVBOID);
    glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, IndexVBOID);

    glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, sizeof(MyVertex), 0);
    glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, sizeof(MyVertex), (void*)(NumOfV*sizeof(float)));//Number of vertices times size of float
    glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, NumOfF*3, GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0);//number of indices

    glDisableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY);
    glDisableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY);
}

Rendering without VBO:

Rendering with VBO:

Answer 1

glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, sizeof(MyVertex), (void*)(NumOfV*sizeof(float)));//Number of vertices times size of float

Your offset is wrong here. You’re providing interleaved vertex data, so that the first three floats are your positions and the next three floats are the normals. Your base offset for normals is therefore 3 floats worth of bytes (to skip the position). NumOfV is the number of vertices in your entire model, not the number of floats for positions in your MyVertex data structure.

This is best done with the offsetof macro:

glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, sizeof(MyVertex), (void*)offsetof(MyVertex, x));
glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, sizeof(MyVertex), (void*)offsetof(MyVertex, nx));