I realize I've been bothering a lot of people with openGL questions, so I thought I'd say hi and thank everyone who's been quite helpful with me so far. Currently I am working on a CAM/CAD like project. So far I've gotten basic functionality into this beast such that I can read in data, model it, then manipulate it (basic college stuff right?). I plan is to add more advanced functionality as I go and hopefully have a building tool that works pretty well (ala Google SketchUp or Solidworks). Eventually I'd like to either open source it, or make it into a game, but for now, I'm having basic problems that need to be addressed. For instance: Whenever I rotate a model, at a certain angle, a border becomes a solid black wall because of the griding. http://img406.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sampletd7.jpg So far, I have yet to come up with a technique to solve this problem, but I figured, instead of coming here every 30 minutes and bothering you guys every time I can't do anything, I could pick your brains for resources and examples I can leaf through. The things I'd like to do now are: 1. calculate rotational changes to ZPR, so that I have more than 2 degrees of freedom. 2. be able create additions via screen clicks (ala Google SketchUp). This requires something more advanced than my current implementation, but it involves keeping track of the window coordinate in relation to the object coordinate, and just "assume" that all mouse movements are relative to the original click point 3. a better implementation of an overlay. This isn't technically hard, but if there was a blueprint for easy intuitive overlay architecture, I would love to read it instead of having to go back and redo every other line of code because I didn't know what I was doing. 4. make millions of dollars and spend the rest of my days tormenting my enemies and spurned lovers in an underwater death match prison. 5. "add" and "subtract" geometry. 6. grab an object, and move it around in relation to other objects in the model. 7. curse the lameness that is openGL 3 8. find some way to make a game out of this. Anyways, thanks for not immediately chasing me out of here with pitchforks and torches. I hope I can contribute to this forum.

1) quaternions?
2) keep
vec3 g_LastFocusedPos; // position of last vertex created/marked
vec3 g_LastFocusedVectorToScreen; // vector, pointing from that vertex towards eye

i.e if you click in the Front-Viewport (X:Y) at coords x1:y1, create a vertex at position vec3(x1',y1',g_LastFocusedPos.z) , where x1' and y1' are such, that their projection/ortho onscreen = x1:y1
if you drag that point, compute how much to drag by the vector above

3) FBOs ?
5) I think there's code/tutorials, and some theory about this online
6) I don't understand. Keep the same distance from a parent, while moving? That kinda will solve itself automatically when you make a parenting system (nodes having children, each node with a matrix or relative pos/rot).