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This article will cover the basics of drawing bezier curves in openGL and how to convert from other curves to Bezier, such as Bspline and Catmull-Rom curves.

Declaring control Points

The way to declare a list of control points for openGL usage is an one dimensional matrix. Since a curve segment only has in account 4 control points:

A Bezier curve only needs the last point of the previous curve to be continuous. Catmull-Rom and Bspline need to know the last 3 points from the previous curve to be continuous.

In the case you have more than 4 points, lets say 7, you would draw 2 curves from p0 to p3 and p3 to p6 in case of a Bezier curve and 5 curves in Catmull-Rom and Bspline going from p0 to p3, p1 to p4, p2 to p5 and p3 to p6 for them to become continous.

Drawing a Bezier curve in openGL

OpenGL has the ability to draw Bezier curves almost directly using the map function but for completeness sake the matrix for a bezier curve is the following:

The following code in JOGL will draw a Bezier line using the map procedure:

public void drawLine(GL gl, double[] controlPoints) {
	DoubleBuffer ctrlPointBuffer = BufferUtil.newDoubleBuffer(3*controlPoints.length);

	for(int i = 0; i < controlPoints.length; i++)
		ctrlPointBuffer.put(controlPoints[i]);
	ctrlPointBuffer.rewind();

	gl.glMap1d(GL.GL_MAP1_VERTEX_3, 0.0, 1.0, 3, 4, ctrlPointBuffer);

	gl.glEnable(GL.GL_MAP1_VERTEX_3);
	gl.glBegin(GL.GL_LINE_STRIP);
	for (int i = 0; i <= 30; i++) {
		gl.glEvalCoord1f(i / 30.0f);
	}
	gl.glEnd();
	gl.glFlush();
}

Converting other curves to Bezier

To convert the control points of another type of curve to a Bezier control points you need to:

mCustom * mInverseBezier * customCntlPoints = bezierCntlPoints

The inverse of the Bezier matrix used for the conversion of the control points is:

Example of a conversion from Catmull-Rom to Bezier

Example of a conversion from B-Spline to Bezier

That was it, thank you for reading.

Comments are welcome!

Note: I used Matrices in HTML to present the matrices in this post. It uses css and tables to present them correctly.