This week, I looked for free 3D engines. Since OpenGL's features are not sufficent for our project, I searched more suitable 3D engines. I found ogre3d, Irrlicht Engine, and Crystal Space 3D.
Ogre3d Engine : Simple, easy to use interface designed to minimise the effort required to render 3D scenes, and to be independent of 3D implementation. Common requirements like render state management, spatial culling, dealing with transparency are done automatically. Supported platforms are Windows (all major versions), Linux and Mac OSX.
Irrlicht Engine : The Irrlicht Engine is a cross-platform high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is a high level API for creating complete 3D and 2D applications like games or scientific visualizations. It comes with a documentation and integrates all the state-of-the-art features for visual representation like dynamic shadows, particle systems, character animation, indoor and outdoor technology, and collision detection. All this is accessible through a well designed C++ interface, which is easy to use. Irrlicht Engine is platform independent. It runs on Windows95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Linux, OSX.
Crystal Space 3D : Crystal Space 3D is highly platform independent with good platform abstraction. Officially supports Linux, OSX and Windows using a wide range of compilers. Contains modules for 2d and 3d graphics, sound, collision detection and dynamics via ODE and bullet as well as support modules for filesystem abstraction, xml loading etc. Crystal Space includes a foliage generator. This generator can randomly (based on user supplied input like density map and material based densities) place objects like stones, trees, grass, and so on. Skeletal animation and dynamic shadows let users create characters that look and feel more lifelike.
