OGRE

Virtual graphics has constantly evolved over the years and users can now experience features-rich and immersive 3D worlds from the comfort of one's home.

All these technical improvements have been built over years of testing and development, and one of the rather popular engines employed in a wide variety of environments is OGRE.

The SDK, whose name is an acronym for Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine allows developers to create life-like virtual environments, fully customizable with C++ code.

For software engineers not familiar with this language, the library features popular and stable ports to other common scripting environments, including .NET (MOGRE), Python (Python-Ogre), and Java (Ogre4j).

As for the actual performance of the rendering engine, the SDK provides support for transparency and light or shadow effects, as well as for multitexture and multipass blending.

Loading customized textures is allowed and one can even generate real-time video feeds to automate the importing process.

Working with meshes and animations is supported and the engine features advanced algorithms for handling model framework items, such as joints and bones.

Developers can enhance their virtual environments with several special effects, including ribbon trails and complex particle systems, as well as various skybox animations.

As for the technical details, the tool is fully compatible with Direct3D 11 and OpenGL (including ES, ES2, ES3 or OGL3+ variants). This ensures developers can tap into all the power provided by the two popular APIs.

With more than ten years of continuous development, the graphics engine features a bustling forum, wiki, and main page, all of which are good resources when problems occur.

More-so, multiple offline samples are available, which can be thoroughly tested to experience the power and versatility of the 3D engine.