I’m developing in MonoTouch and I have an issue where a 3D model should be drawn on-screen, making it possible to rotate around and zoom in/out.
Usually, developing things for iOS (apart for the usual weird API kinks) is a breeze. I need an image, I load it and display it with a few lines of code. Same goes for audio, touch events etc. However, when I try to look at 3D stuff, what I get is OpenGL-ES 2.0 which seems unnecessary low-level and far from “plug n play”. Weird enough, but what seemed even weirder was that I couldn’t find any simple framework to go around it. Am I missing something here? I found Unity3D but that’s way more than I need (not to mention the price, and again, learning curve).
Do I really have to invest time in learning the intricacies of 3D rendering when I just want to display a model? Seems OpenGL-ES-1.1 is a bit simpler but may not have the functionality I need (and again, the lack of “1-2-3 this is how it works”-tutorials seems weird to me). Or are my google skills way poorer than I thought?
Sorry if the question implies a vague answer, but summarized I guess my question is “What’s the simplest way of displaying/rotating/zooming a 3D model in MonoTouch using OpenGL-ES 1.1/2.0 (preferrably 2.0, but 1.1 is also ok)?”
I got this geat tutorial for OpenGL ES 2.0.
Its not unnecessary low-level IMHO. It enables a broad possible uses, e.g. creating a game and a simple 3D visualization are two different applications which may not need everything the other app has.
Of course it would be great if it would be more like DirectX but you can create the necessary classes by your own in no time.
If you want a non-low-level api, consider using something like Unity3D.