Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

I noticed that there have been quite a few Python related posts on Planet Debian lately. Here's mine.

I'm having a really hard time trying to find a good solution for rendering an OpenGL scene (e.g. from a VRML file) using PyOpenGL and/or OpenGLContext in the command line. All solutions I tried so far pop up an X11-window, which is not what I'm looking for. Instead I want to render the scene and dump it to PNG/JPG without requiring an X11 server.

Can this be done with PyOpenGL/OpenGLContext? I could probably try to use xvfb, but that's really an ugly hack. Besides the images I get using xvfb are somewhat broken, not sure why (does xvfb support OpenGL?).

Any hints are appreciated.

It's late at night, so what else could I do than watch the stars? Of course, as I am such a moron geek, I don't just look out of the window — I use GPL'd software to watch the stars.


apt-get install stellarium