Power Render is a set of tools for creating interactive 3D applications. People in the games business call this a 3D Engine. Just like a car engine is composed of many complex parts, a 3D engine also contains many different parts:

Application Programming Interface (API) or Software Development Kit (SDK) used by programmers, for total control over the application

Geometry Importers and Preview Tools, used by modelers to preview 3D geometry in the engine

World Editor, used by level designers to build entire worlds from individual elements such as terrain, BSP objects, characters, etc

Many other useful tools, such as archive managers, font conversion, material and shader editors

Power Render has advanced features that normally take a lot of code in a lower level API like DirectX or OpenGL. Power Render includes routines that would take many years of research yourself. Keeping the engine up to date with new technology is a never-ending task and is probably something you don’t want to want to deal with. Power Render supports the latest advances in 3D technology and makes it accessible in an easy way. Every year Microsoft releases a new version of DirectX to expose new hardware features. With Power Render you don’t have to change your source code since you don’t access the DirectX interfaces directly. You won’t have to spend weeks or even months updating your code, because we’ve done it for you.

Furthermore specialized libraries for character animation, sound effects and music can cost thousands of dollars to license separately. Power Render already has these parts working together and integrated with the game engine and editor.

Power Render comes with these tools: geometry importers, a level editor, character and particle effect editor, object preview and material editor, true type font to texture converter, archive manager and Quake3 BSP converter. All of these tools will help you get content into the engine quickly. Supported modeling applications are : 3D Studio MAX, Character Studio, Lightwave, and Maya. Additionally, any application that can create .3DS, .LWO, or .MD2 files can also be used with the engine. Exporters for regular geometry, keyframing, skinning using bipeds and morph targets are provided.

Power Render’s features are comparable to and in many areas surpass the most popular 3D engines, such as Quake3, Unreal, Lithtech, Renderware, Genesis/Jet3D, Auran Jet, and NetImmerse. However Power Render costs a fraction of these engines due to the way it was developed. Power Render’s different license agreements are very open and allow you to do almost anything with the engine and tools provided, including redistributing and modifying the tools.

Proprietary file formats. This allows new technologies to be added quickly without altering the API. For instance when vertex and pixel shaders were added, no changes were made to the the rendering calls. All shader code and constants are defined inside the object files. Power Render also contains an extremely flexible character animation file format which lets you animate MD2, 3DS, Biped, Morph Targets, and particle effects all using the same interface.

Language Support. Power Render can be used with C, C++, Delphi and .NET platforms.

Engine Overview:

Platforms
Full DirectX 9 support
C, C++ or Delphi using dynamic link libraries
Managed .NET wrapper
Supports all Win32 C/C++ compilers (Officially tested on MSVC 6, CodeWarrior 7, and Borland C++ Builder 6) and Borland Delphi
AMD 3D Now Optimized!

General
Extremely easy API developed over 8 years of actual usage with commercial applications
Not limited to first person indoor type games, use it for anything... games, virtual reality, screensavers, 3D on the web
Both indoor and outdoor rendering, go underground, fully deformable terrain
Don’t need to learn a single DirectX command. No messing with render states before rendering each object! You can call Direct3D directly in addition to using PR routines, however it’s not needed.
Online HTML help for all tools and main documentation


Rendering
16 or 32 bit color, full screen and windowed rendering
Modify Pixel and Vertex shaders without changing a line of source code. Shader constants are set up automatically by the engine before an object is rendered.
High level shader support: Code using assembly, Cg, or DX9’s HLSL all from the same interface. Shaders stored within object files.
Z buffering, Stencil Buffering with shadow volumes, double sided stencilling
Supports full custom software 3D pipeline as well as D3D hardware transformation and lighting pipeline
Use both pipelines in a single frame if needed
Single pass and multipass multitexturing
Full screen antialiasing
Multimonitor output support
Dynamic lighting with directional, omni, spot, and lightmaps.
Automatic mipmap generation
Vertex fogging
Environment mapping
Environmental and DOT3 Bump Mapping
Render to textures
Cube mapping
Procedural textures
Compressed textures
Bounding box visibility culling
Realtime dynamic shadows using projection, shadow volumes, or shadow maps
Multiple materials per object (multi/sub materials)
Realtime tesselated curved surfaces
Quake 3 BSP support with lightmaps, shaders, curves, PVS, and collision
True Type Font support
Progressive meshes for objects
Hardware shadow maps using Geforce 3/4/FX
Stencil shadows for meshes, characters, and BSP
Octree subdivision for fast per polygon collision detection against arbitrary meshes.
Play movies in fullscreen or on a texture with sound
Point Sprite particle systems
NPatch Support (ATI’s TruForm)

Input
Full screen and windowed: mouse, keyboard, and joystick routines
Force Feedback support
Act-labs USB Light Gun support


Content Creation Tools

Power Render includes several end user (non programmer) tools that make it easy to import and create new content for the engine. These tools all run in a window and use the standard Microsoft Windows GUI that everyone is familiar with. Having excellent tools such as these are what gives Power Render the edge over other engines. You get much more than just a set of routine libraries!

PRO Edit

PRO Edit is the all in one tool for previewing content in the engine.
Import and view 3DS, LWO, LWS and PRO files, characters, and particle systems.
Change the material properties or texturing effects.
Apply multitexturing, environment mapping, and bump mapping to plain objects.
Load in multiple objects and build scenes from them.
Move lights and apply precalculated lighting to objects.
Test character animations and particle effects created with the Character Editor.
Edit Vertex and Pixel shaders and see the results instantly.
Calculate and preview progressive mesh data
Test objects with fogging or against background images
Save results to PR’s proprietary file format for use your application


Character Edit
Import animations and add scripted events at certain frames, like sounds, particles, and collision events.
Import 3DS, MD2, 3DS MAX Morph Targets, and Biped animations (Character Studio 2 and 3)
Create particle system effects using multiple emitter and particle types (eg explosions, fires, smoke, fountains, weapon effects)
Attach other objects such as sword, shields, and helmets to specific bones along with realtime visual offset and rotation alignment.

Landscape Studio
Create unique worlds from scratch in minutes
Edit heightfield based geometry in 3D, using rectangular region or paintbrush tools
Control the terrain, water, and sky visually
Full WYSIWYG 3D interface
Add 3D objects, characters, BSP’s, particle effects, and change their properties like scale, rotation, physics and more
Place objects in BSP levels
Set up paths for objects to follow
Set up events for game logic using triggers, counters, and other hidden types
Assign custom variables used for AI

Font Maker
Convert TrueType fonts to bitmaps for fast antialiased text output

Archive Manager
Group large numbers of files together into a single archive that can be read by the engine. All engine loading routines can recognize the archive format and load from it directly. A command line utility is also provided. The engine can also load directly from compressed ZIP files.

Q3 Convert
Convert Quake3 BSP levels to PR’s format for indoor areas. Full texturing, lightmaps, curves, collision, PVS, and shader support.

Biped Exporter
Export Character Studio bipeds and fully textured characters

3DS MAX Exporter
Advanced 3D Studio MAX (2 and 3 and 4) exporter plugin for static geometry and morph targets

Maya Exporter
Maya exporter plugins for static geometry and animated skinned characters


Features In Depth

Rendering States
The engine has prebuilt rendering states and the ability to design your own. No matter if you want to draw an object using flat shading, gouraud texture, or iterated RGB with environmental bump maps and 4X modulation, simply select the rendering state number from within the Power Render material editor and your mesh is drawn with a whole new look. There is no programming or scripting involved. Power Render automatically downgrades to other states on cards which do not support multitexture and bump mapping, by either using multiple passes to achieve the same effect or leaving out details. Rendering states also set up textures and colors for each vertex, allowing you to add in custom effects such as waves moving over an ocean floor, or scrolling texture coordinates for a moving sky or layer of fog. The same object using decal texture, gouraud texture, per vertex color, and bump mapping.

Easy to use commands and file format
One of the greatest advantages of Power Render is the use of a custom file format called PRO (Power Render Object). A single function call will load in an object or scene with animation, along with all the materials and textures used. This lets you do all your model preparation inside the PRO Edit utility before touching any code. Simple API commands allow you to move, rotate, scale, animate, and create new instances of an object.

Texture Support
Power Render has automatic texture conversion, scaling, quantization, filtering, and caching. Many texture formats are supported, including JPEG, PNG, PCX, IFF, LBM, TGA, DDS You can also create textures directly from a memory buffer allowing you to load in custom formats. Using the PRO Edit utility, you can load in new textures on the fly and see how an object will look with different combinations of textures using multitexturing.

3D Mesh Support
Import objects, textures, hierarchy, cameras, and keyframed animation from 3D Studio MAX 3 and 4, Maya 4, or Lightwave. Play back your scenes in realtime and change the rendering methods to make them look better than what was originally created in the modelling program. Animation is controlled by a single function call, and can play scenes in any direction, speed, or frame order.

Terrain Engine
Power Render includes and amazingly fast and realistic landscape engine. The landscape mesh is not a regular object which ends like most other engines. The world wraps around infinitely, so you can fly in any direction and never reach a world boundary. The engine supports fully deformable terrain, so you can add moving waves, blast craters, and dig holes at any time. The engine also supports per pixel rippling bump mapped reflections on alpha blended water, static and dynamic soft shadows with color keying (good for trees), multilayer moving skies using sky cubes and planes, detail textures.

Heightfield based, fully deformable in real time
Dynamic soft shadows
Realtime rippling reflections using environmental bump mapping
Paint directly on the terrain texture in realtime
Blast marks, tread marks, and other terrain details last forever unlike other engines
Supports both software and hardware T&L, using terrain patches and quadtree visibility
Sky rendering system using skyboxes and animated cloud layers
Combine with BSP engine to go inside and underground buildings with no transitions

Landscape engine suitable for first person shooter, real time strategy, racing, and other genres

Terrain Splatting Engine
Power Render 5 now includes a terrain engine that features texture splatting. This works similar to Photoshop’s layers by blending several layers of textures together to display the terrain. This gives you the ability to have much larger terrains that are not limited by texture size, more texture details, the ability to display smooth texture transitions while changing the height of the terrain in realtime, and the ability to paint roads and other features directly on the world.

Portal engine
Full source code for a portal based rendering engine is included. This system allows you to define an entire portal based world in a 3D editor and walk around it with collision detection. Rotating mirrors and gateways that show another location are possible. Mirrors and gateways are not limited to rectangular surfaces. They could be spirals, circles, or any convex or concave flat surface composed of any number of triangles.

Animation
A complex character animation system is included with full source code. Import MD2 models, jointed 3DS animations, or Character Studio files with seamless skinned bones. Add sounds, particles, and other events. Supports characters with multiple layers, so you can switch clothing, weapons, and accessories. Each layer has a unique particle system, so if a player switches weapons the system will automatically create different kinds of emitters when a weapon is fired.

Time-based keyframing system with full playback controls and linear/bezier/TCB interpolation.
Full keyframing export and playback from 3DS MAX
Animated morphing mesh support, using vertex shaders
Realtime soft skinning support with Character Studio exporter

Per Vertex Colors
Using certain rendering states you can store a precalculated color for each vertex. This gives an object more depth. The PRO Edit utility allows you to position lights and see the results instantly. Using precalculated lighting allows you to add unlimited numbers of lights to an object or scene, and it requires no processing time during rendering. Precalculated lighting can also be added with dynamic lighting if you wish. This can also be used as an alternate to radiosity for indoor scenes. The same object using decal texturing, and per vertex coloring

Particle System
Particles and emitters provide special effects for things like lasers, explosions, blood and guts, missiles, and smoke. A particle can either be a 3D sprite or a 3D mesh. Both sprites and meshes can be animated. Particles can have gravity, horizontal drag, alpha fading, or a changing scale applied to them. Emitters can have gravity, rotation velocity, or bounce factors, and emit multiple particles with random speeds and distance away from the emitter. Each particle and emitter has user defined callback routines for collision and drawing. This allows you to draw particles with reflections, or make an emitter blow up into one or more new emitters when it collides with an object or wall. All of this is handle by the particle system at a frame rate independent speed.

Collision detection
Collision detection is an important part of realtime games. Power Render includes several methods of collision detection, including terrain, triangle, polytopes, rays, and planes. Collisions with a single ray and a triangle are possible, allowing you to select objects out of a polygon soup. BSP engine supports sliding along walls and projectiles that bounce off walls correctly. OctTree collision routines allow sliding and bouncing off any 3D polygon mesh.

Sound
DirectSound Library - Wrapper library for DirectSound3D with support for Creative Labs EAX technology, attach sounds to 3D objects
DirectMusic support
CD Music Support
MP3 Playing using DirectShow
You can also use any other sound library.