Harnessing the power of an elaborate graphics engine, such as Ogre 3D is time-consuming, but a highly rewarding pursuit. Developers, over the world, attest to Ogre's elegance, versatility, and efficiency, not to mention that its code is open source and supported by a thriving online community. This book explores many useful and fun ways to leverage Ogre 3D, to make your graphics application fully-featured and entertaining.

OGRE (Object-oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) 3D is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce applications utilizing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.

Graphics application development with OGRE 3D may start small, but may soon balloon into monstrously complex beasts, which just can't be all understood at once. This book will help you to easily develop applications using OGRE 3D.

OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook will help solve common problems you may face while developing 3D graphics applications using OGRE 3D. You will learn to create various types of Windows applications, scene querying, and visibility analysis among other things from this book.

This book includes some advanced recipes involved in developing applications with OGRE 3D. Each recipe deals with adding some specific feature to your application.

The book first covers creating various types of Windows applications available for the OGRE developer, creating plugins for customization, and OGRE resources management. You will then learn to efficiently implement various input methods for OGRE applications followed by managing scenes and objects impressively. Lights, special effects, and materials that provide enhancing effects are covered next. Further, character motion and collision detection are included followed by animations and multimedia, which help in producing a thorough professional look. Finally, we wrap it up with scene queries and views.

OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook provides a great reference for your OGRE 3D application development needs and helps you to deliver impressive results more quickly and with greater ease.

Get quick solutions to problems that may occur while using the OGRE 3D graphics rendering engine

What you will learn from this book

• Delve deep into application design through creating Win32, MFC, and Windows Forms OGRE 3D applications
• Build a simple OGRE 3D plugin to add customized effects to your application
• Learn to use keyboard, mouse, and voice inputs
• Implement Delaunay triangulation for terrain
• Create a parametric superellipsoid
• Add trees as bill boards and create and edit scenes
• Implement weather control and shadow effects for a professional look
• Use geoimages as texture for terrain and create dynamic textures for that special effect
• Create different types of animation such as skeletal, morph, and pose animation
• Manage views and zoom and create orbit views

Approach

This is a cookbook with over 50 recipes offering solutions to common application development problems while creating graphics using OGRE 3D, with explained sample code and screenshots added in. Each recipe teaches you about a particular feature of OGRE 3D.

Who this book is written for

If you are a C++ programmer with basic knowledge of OGRE 3D and want to enhance your knowledge about OGRE 3D further, then this book is for you. Basic knowledge of 3D graphics application development is required.