Horde3D
Documentation
Version 1.0.0
Overview
Horde3D is a small but powerful open source 3D rendering and animation engine. It is written in an effort to create a graphics engine that can compete with the quality and performance of commercial next-generation engines while at the same time being lightweight and conceptually clean. Although Horde has a heavily object oriented structure internally it should not be considered as a class library but a self-contained component with a well-defined generic interface. The API interface is exposed in a C-style manner and makes it thus possible to use the engine from virtually any programming language with minimal effort. A special point of interest for the design of the engine is the ability to render large crowds of animated characters with superior quality, although the engine is in no way limited to that sort of application.
One of the most important design goals of Horde3D is to keep things simple and avoid complexity where possible without sacrificing flexibility or productivity. A good portion of the development effort is spent on finding concepts to achieve these sometimes conflicting goals. The result is that Horde has a well designed resource management and scene graph system that gives you control without the need for a plenty of diverse functions. Furthermore the engine has a powerful animation system which supports skeletal and rigid animations with complete blending and mixing capabilities and morph targets for facial expressions. Much of the power and flexibility of the engine comes from its shader driven architecture and customizable pipeline that makes it possible to apply nearly all modern rendering and post processing techniques.
License
Horde3D is licensed under the terms of the Eclipse Public License (EPL) version 1.0.
You can receive a copy of the license from this link.
Using Horde3D
If you are new to Horde the following section will provide you with basic information to help you getting started.
Getting Started
Basic Concepts
Bringing Content to the Engine
Advanced Topics
References
Details on using the Horde3D API and data formats are available in this section.
Engine API Reference
Utility Library API Reference
Data Format Reference
Rendering Pipeline Documentation
Other Documents
All other documents of interest are available here.