PyOpenGL Installation

Most users of PyOpenGL should use pip to install PyOpenGL automatically. It can be installed either to the system Python or a Virtualenv.

$ pip install PyOpenGL PyOpenGL_accelerate

Manual Installation

If you cannot, or would prefer not to, use pip, you can download the package from PyPI.

• PyOpenGL
• PyOpenGL_accelerate
• PyOpenGL Demo

The package uses Setuptools for its installation.

$ tar -zxvf PyOpenGL-3.1.0.tar.gz
$ cd PyOpenGL-3.1.0
$ python setup.py install

If you would like the (optional) PyOpenGL-accelerate package, download it from the PyOpenGL_accelerate PyPI page and follow the same basic steps:

Note that you will require a working C compiler to compile the PyOpenGL-accelerate package. Pre-built packages are available for MS Windows 32 and MS Windows 64 users.

$ tar -zxvf PyOpenGL-accelerate-3.1.0.tar.gz
$ cd PyOpenGL-accelerate-3.1.0
$ python setup.py install

Recommended Enhancements for PyOpenGL

• Numpy
• GLUT or FreeGLUT
  • Available as an rpm/deb/ebuild for most modern Linux machines
  • The Win32 and Win64 binary installers for PyOpenGL include a copy of GLUT
• Python Imaging Library (PIL) any recent version 
• GLE
• The GL Extrusion library, available on most Linux distributions (libgle3)
• The Win32 package of PyOpenGL includes a copy of GLE compiled as a DLL

Note that Togl support is deprecated, it's there for legacy code (once you compile Togl), but you should choose a GUI library that has OpenGL support built-in for any new development.  Togl support has been dropped due to the complexity of compilation and the headache of maintenance.  There are projects which attempt to provide Togl support, feel free to install those into your Python's Tk installation if you need Togl under Python.

OpenGLContext Installation

OpenGLContext is a very large package that depends on a large number of other packages to function. You do NOT need OpenGLContext to work with PyOpenGL.

Basic installation of OpenGLContext is as follows:

$ virtualenv oglc-env
$ source oglc-env/bin/activate
(oglc-env)$ pip install PyOpenGL PyOpenGL_accelerate PyVRML97 simpleparse numpy ttfquery fonttools OpenGLContext pydispatcher pillow

Recommended Enhancements for OpenGLContext

• wxPython and/or 
• PyGame 
  • Additional contexts/windowing environments, only GLUT contexts are available otherwise.
  • PyGame also provides antialiased bitmap fonts, while wxPython can provide aliased bitmap fonts if necessary
• win32all 
  • win32ui and win32con provide support for WGL-based polygonal text, only available for Win32 systems of course.  The WGL polygonal text is not used by the scenegraph engine, so it is not required for anything save playing with the WGL polygonal text demonstration module.

git (Developer) Install

If you would like to contribute to PyOpenGL development or just need to ride the bleeding edge, you will likely want to work with a source-code checkout.  You will need the Git (git) tool to work with the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/mcfletch/pyopengl.git
$ cd pyopengl
$ python setup.py develop --user
$ cd accelerate
$ python setup.py develop --user
$ cd ../../

Building Documentation

The documentation build system is completely rewritten for PyOpenGL 3.x and is far easier to use and faster  (at least a couple of orders of magnitude) than the old Java-based docbook processor.

git checkout
cd directdocs
./samples.py
./references.py
./generate.py
./upload.py

The last command will not work unless you happen to be me. You need the lxml.etree and kid packages installed to run the generator (also bzr, svn, PyOpenGL, cvs, etceteras).