glutSolidSphere lighting issue when further away

Question

For some reason I get weird patchy lighting effects/flickering when using glutSolidSphere and the camera is relatively far away from the object. See below:

This also happens with glutSolidCube and I assume the others as well.

I've tried everything I could find in similar questions but no luck with that

• Glusphere giving strange lighting
• Lighting does not work with gluSphere

I've tried enabling all of the below and different combinations of the below and tried doing so in multiple places

glEnable(GL_BLEND);
glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);
glEnable(GL_LINE_SMOOTH);
glEnable(GL_NORMALIZE);
glDepthFunc(GL_LEQUAL);

And also removed all glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); anyhere

The problem happens when I turn on lighting with glEnable(GL_LIGHT0); and occurs with glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH) and glShadeModel(GL_FLAT) and also if I don't enable GL_COLOR_MATERIAL and even occurs with just a positional light like so:

float light_position[] = {100.0f, 100.0f, 100.0f, 1.0f};
glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_POSITION, light_position);

What else could this be?

Answer 1

Finally figured out the problem after forever. Apparently using a very low value (even if above zero) for zNear in the gluPerspective view causes this problem.

The following fixed the problem:

gluPerspective(90, (float) width / (float) height, 0.1f, Z_RANGE);

See: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/55516