a lightweight
3d graphics engine
protea Documentation
v2009-09-12
Protea is a 3D graphics engine layered on top of OpenGL which lends itself very well for fast prototyping purposes. Due to its simplicity, it can be easily learned and used to rapidly test programming ideas that require the ability to load 3D scenes from files and display and manipulate them in realtime. Furthermore, its minimalistic and non-intrusive design makes protea a perfect basis to test rendering algorithms and design ideas, or to build more specialized or complete solutions on top of it. Despite its tininess, protea is mature and complete enough to be productively used in mid-sized projects, its liberal licensing conditions (zlib style) allow the library to be used both in commercial and non-commercial, open source and closed source projects.
- clean minimal C++ code base, portable, extendable class design
- makes optimized use of fast hardware-accelerated industry standard OpenGL (1.2+) 3D graphics API
- regularly tested on MS Windows and Linux (MinGW/gcc compiler)
- capable of loading and writing 3D mesh models based on a subset of ISO standard xml-encoded X3D, supporting all basic nodes
- extensible framework for the support of further 3D scene formats, various mesh loaders and writers available (OBJ, VRML, 3DS, OGRE3D)
- basic hierarchical scene graph and frustum culling
- loading all flavors (8, 16, 24, 32 bit, paletted, RLE, uncompressed) of Targa images as textures
- optionally loadng and saving of PNG and JPEG images via libpng (http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/) and libjpeg (http://www.ijg.org/) [ new ]
- text rendering support using simple texture fonts
- optional experimental cast shadows using shadow volumes both for point lights and distant lights
- both flat face shading and smooth Gouraud shading possible within the same object, depending on definable crease angle
- complete set of generic linear algebra / vector mathematics classes
- ray casting and scene query functions
- optional Lua based scripting framework for the flexible integration of modules at runtime [ new ]
- generic input device access abstraction layer, allowing for flexible remapping at runtime [ new ]
- optional connection to external input devices via adapter applications without direct linking (see class DeviceLocal) [ new ]
- deployment of executables amde easy, because protea and all its (optional) dependencies legally and technically allow for static linking
Protea is a slowly yet constantly evolving spare-time project. Due to that, it is unlikely that there will ever be something like a true final release. However, from time to time self-contained and fairly stable states will be published and archived at the protea website (http://www.viremo.de/protea).
Protea has been designed to introduce only a minimum of external dependencies:
- A C++ compiler including an implementation of the Standard Template Library. Protea is mainly developed and maintained using the GNU C++ compiler 3.2+ under the development platforms Linux and Windows. The provided Makefiles work both for Linux and MinGW under Windows. Exemplary project files for MS VisualStudio 2008 are included as well.
- Currently an OpenGL (1.2+) implementation is mandatory. Since Protea deliberately maintains the possibility to mix it with low level graphic access, it is rather improbable that further graphic library interfaces such as DirectX will ever be added.
- For flexible integration of C++ objects at runtime, the proCallable base class is available. It requires the Lua virtual machine available at http://www.lua.org . Apart from the demo applications, protea does not make use of the Lua VM internally at the moment, hence this dependency can be seen as optional.
- In order to open a window and to get user input, an additional input library is required. While protea itself can work with any framework, the provided example is based on GLFW (http://glfw.sf.net) which shares the same liberal license conditions (see below). Alternatively, libSDL (http://www.libsdl.org) may be used to get platform independent access to high performance multimedia and input programming interfaces. libSDL has a slightly more restrictive license (LGPL), but offers additional features such as audio functions.
- While not a requirement, conv3d (http://www.viremo.de/conv3d) is a perfect complementary application that allows 3D geometry models in a wide variety of file format to be converted into protea-compatible X3D files. In addition, the convert tool from the ImageMagick package lends itself very well to convert from other image formats to the TGA format natively required by protea.
(c) 2006-2009 by Gerald Franz, www.viremo.de
This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the author be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.
Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely, subject to the following restrictions:
- The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required.
- Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.
- This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.
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© 2009-09-12 by Gerald Franz, www.viremo.de
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