Here’s an OpenGL gotcha which caught me out for quite a while. I was writing code to load textures, but it only worked if I was using the GLU function to build mipmaps. Loading standard textures kept failing. After lots of frustration, I eventually found my mistake.
Background
My code used the FreeImage library to load the image files from disk. I was then rescaling to powers-of-two dimensions, and checking that the input format was compatible. Finally, I was loading the texture using glTexImage2D().
I didn’t care about mipmaps at this early stage so I loaded the texture at level 0. I’d made sure the minification filter was set to GL_LINEAR (which doesn’t use mipmaps).
Everything seemed fine in the code, and yet the textures were not being rendered. All I could see were coloured polygons. The only way I could get the textures to render was if I switched my glTexImage2D() function call for gluBuild2DMipmaps(). I double-checked that my texture filters were correctly setup, and sure enough I had the following code in my OpenGL initialisation function:
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glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR);
The problem
It took a long time, but after some digging, I eventually realised my mistake. I had assumed that the texture parameters set by glTexParameter*() were applied to the texture target (in this case, GL_TEXTURE_2D). However, they are actually per-texture properties. That is, the properties are applied only to the texture object which is currently bound to that target at the time the texture parameter function is called.
The solution
It’s easy really. Instead of specifying the texture parameters in my OpenGL initialisation function, I specified them in the texture loading function, immediately after my call to glTexImage2D(). Everything worked fine after that.