Building a Solar System

With these basic tools in our 3D arsenal, we can actually start in the main project of building a small solar-system model. What makes a solar system so ideal is that it has a very basic simple shape, several objects that must all move around each other, and a single light source. The reason why the cube example was used at first is that the shape is about as elementary as you can get for 3D, so the code was not full of extraneous geometry. When you get to something such as a sphere, much of the code will go to creating just the object, as you will see.

Although OpenGL is a great low-level platform, it still leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to anything remotely high level. As you saw in Chapter 1, when it comes to modeling tools, many available third-party frameworks could ultimately be used to do the job, but for now we're just going to be sticking with basic OpenGL ES.