   Putting Blocks Together.
  Dear all,I am new to OpenGL and I want to learn how to put 3 blocks together to form a "robo" hand. Do I join the blocks using translation? Or is there a much better way... My hand doesnt really move together and it looks like it can only move block by block instead of acting as a hand. Anyone??Cheers   
  Moving you to OpenGL.   ;  If you're thinking purely about animating a kinematic arm then you could look up information about "hierarchical animation" or "skinning" (animating through a hierarchy of bones and joints). A simple hierarchy and the use of OpenGL's matrix stacks would be a good starting point.Consider one block to be "locked in place", having only 3 DOF (degrees of freedom), namely rotation. You could rotate that block using a series of glRotatef calls. Next you would position the second block relatively to the first one using a translation (concatenated to the current transformation matrix). Then rotate the second block (in its local frame) and repeat for the third block.If you are talking about moving one joint in order for the other bones to follow, OpenGL won't be able to help you out I'm afraid. You need to look into inverse kinematics (IK) instead.