G3D Innovation Engine is a fully featured, cross platform game engine. This is a 3D engine written in C/C++. It is a commercial-grade, open source engine for different platforms i.e. Windows, Linus and Mac OS. The engine is licensed under BSD-2 license and mainly used for teaching purpose. It supports Real-Time Rendering, Offline Rendering, Ray Tracking, Model Loading and Linear Algebra.

It is maintained by Morgan McGurie, a former game developer, currently an educator and a VR Scientist in NVIDIA. Other than commercial games, this engine is a great source of learning. It is employed in Military Simulations, Tech Demos, Research Papers and Universities’ Courses. It receives contributions from Professional game developers, CAD (Computer Aided Design) developers, students, researchers, professors and industry.

The engine is highly documented providing assistance to the new developers. If the reader is not at home with 3D development, they recommend reading Graphic Codex written by Morgan McGurie. The other useful resources include an extensive User Manual, a set of API References and samples (links are given at the end of this article).

This game engine is developed over the last several years. It has a stable backward compatible API. Minor releases are also backward compatible that is released once in every two months and announced well before, on the user forum.

Beginning C++17
Master modern programming with Beginning C++17 – your gateway to building powerful, efficient, and future-ready applications!
View on Amazon

G3D Innovation Engine has a design philosophy i.e., each library must have different properties and some of them include:

  • Easy to use and debug
  • Manages resources for the users.
  • Pieces of the library can be used.
  • Provide access to different data formats.
  • The same source code runs on all operating systems and Graphic Cards.
  • Contains coded needed for all 3D projects.

Other Features

  • Option Of Auto Memory And Resource Management
  • Adding VR To 3D Program by Subclass VRApp
  • Skeletal Animation And Avatars
  • Automatic Controller
  • Ambient Occlusion
  • Antialiasing
  • Order-Independent Transparency
  • Depth Of Field
  • Motion Blur
  • Path Tracking
  • Ray Tracking On CPU And GPU
  • Cloud And Remote Rendering
  • Skybox
  • Drag And Drop Editors
  • Real-Time Video Recorder
  • 3D Audio Using FMOD Technology

Useful References

Back to Game Engines List