Selected APIs by Task

This page lists the most commonly used G3D APIs grouped into functional tasks:

Primary Scene Graph Immediate Mode Rendering 2D Graphical User Interface Debugging Profiling All Scene Graph Shadows

Images and Video Strings File I/O Ray Tracing and Physics Network Memory and Threads

Boldface links designate the most common and easy-to-use features. Indented links are subtopics; they may be helper classes or subclasses. Not all API entry points are shown in this index.

Primary Scene Graph

Integrated high-level infrastructure for physically-based (photorealistic) shader-driven GPU rendering and CPU ray tracing. See also All Scene Graph

	ArticulatedModel	Load 3DS, IFS, PLY2, and OFF files, or construct models from code
	Material
	Material::Settings
	SuperBSDF
	Component	(See also MapComponent, Component1, Component3, Component4)
	BumpMap
	SuperSurface
	Lighting	Point, spot, directional, hemisphere ambient, and environment map
	Sky
	SkyParameters
	GLight
	SuperShader	Customizable GPU shader for use with Material
	Pass
	NonShadowedPass
	ExtraLightPass
	ShadowedPass
	GBuffer	Saito and Takahashi's Geometry Buffers for deferred shading.
	GCamera	Pinhole camera with clipping planes
	ShadowMap
	GBuffer	Saito and Takahashi's Geometry Buffers for deferred shading.

Immediate Mode Rendering

	RenderDevice	Abstraction of a graphics rendering context.
	Texture	A 1D, 2D, or 3D array (e.g., an image) stored on the GPU, commonly used for mapping reflectance values (colors) over meshes.
	Shader	A pair of functions written in GLSL that are invoked by the GPU per vertex and per pixel.
	Framebuffer	Holds a set of G3D::Textures or G3D::Renderbuffers for use as draw targets.
	VertexBuffer	A block of GPU memory within which G3D::VertexRanges can be allocated.
	VertexRange	A block of GPU memory storing a stream of vector data (e.g., vertices, normals, texture coordinates).

2D Graphical User Interface

	GApp	For each frame, the GApp has several tasks that can be implemented by overriding base class methods.
	GuiPane	Container and creator of other GUI controls; obtained from a GuiWindow
	GuiWindow	Skinnable GUI (documentation contains GUI sample code)
	GEvent, GEventType	Event class and type enum, used inside an event handler
	GFont	Explicitly render text
	GApp::onEvent, GApp::onUserInput	Overridable event handlers
	BackgroundWidget	A full-screen texture that sits behind everything else in the scene.
	UserInput	Pollable keyboard, mouse, and joystick state used inside an event handler
	GuiButton, GuiCheckBox, GuiDropDownList, GuiSlider, GuiRadioButton, GuiLabel, GuiTextBox, GuiTextureBox	GUI controls created by GuiPanel
	Widget
	Surface2D	2D object scene graph, used by Widgets for rendering
	Manipulator	Exports a coordinate frame, typically in response to user input.
	FirstPersonManipulator	Uses a First Person (Quake- or World of Warcraft style) mapping to translate keyboard and mouse input into a flying camera position.
	ThirdPersonManipulator	By default, the ThirdPersonManipulator moves an object relative to its own axes.
	msgBox	Create a new OS window popup message

Debugging

	debugAssert	Assertion macro with friendly dialog box in DEBUG builds
	debugPrintf	Prints to the 3D console, terminal, and log.txt
	screenPrintf	Prints information that repeats every frame to the screen
	debugDraw	Draw a shape for debugging purposes
	consolePrintf	Prints to the 3D console and log.txt
	logPrintf	Prints to log.txt
	GApp::debugPane	Add your own debugging GUI controls to this provided window
	debugPrintf	Prints to the terminal (Unix) or Output Window (Win) in DEBUG builds
	logPrintf	Prints to the log.txt file (which you should regularly check for warnings!)
	Draw	Render simple geometric primitives without loading a model
	debugAssertM	Assertion macro with a string message in DEBUG builds
	alwaysAssertM	Assertion macro that remains even in optimized builds
	GApp::catchCommonExceptions	Turn uncaught exceptions into assertion failures
	Log	Guarantees output is written to disk before Log::printf returns
	describeSystem	Returns a string describing the current machine
	isValidHeapPointer	Used in assertions to identify bad pointers
	isValidPointer	Used in assertions to identify bad pointers
	setAssertionHook	Override the behavior of assertion failures
	setFailureHook	Override the behavior of alwaysAssertM failures in RELEASE builds
	GApp::showDebugText	Enable GApp::debugPrintf output

Profiling

	Profiler	Measures execution time on the CPU and GPU of parts of a program.
	Stopwatch	Accurately measure durations and framerates.
	RenderDevice::Stats	Reports measured GPU performance and throughput.
	GApp::showRenderingStats	Display performance information on the 3D window
	System::mallocPerformance, System::mallocStatus, System::resetMallocPerformanceCounters	Measure heap size and detect memory leaks
	System::beginCycleCount, System::endCycleCount	Cycle-accurate timing of very short routines

Supplemental Scene Graph

	Sky	Skybox, moon, sun, and stars
	IFSModel	Rigid body
	ArticulatedModel	Rigid bodies connected by joints, loads 3DS and IFS models
	BSPMap	Quake 3 map
	MD2Model	Quake 2 character
	Surface	Static object that is prepared for rendering. Exposes geometry and adjacency information
	GCamera	Pinhole perspective camera abstraction
	Shape	Geometric primitives primarily used for bounding volumes and debugging
	Material	BSDF; surface material properties

Shadows

Shadow rendering algorithms first determine shadowed locations, and then paint ambient illumination everywhere, and finally add illumination only in non-shadowed areas. There are two major algorithms for determining the shadowed locations in real-time, shadow volumes and shadow maps. G3D supports both, on programmable and fixed function hardware.

	ShadowMap	Shadow map allocation and rendering
	Surface::renderShadowedLightPass	Render shadow volume shadows on any model (when used with begin/endMarkShadows)
	RenderDevice::configureShadowMap	Fixed function shadow map rendering
	Texture::createEmpty(...ImageFormat::DEPTH24, Texture::Settings::shadow)	Create an empty shadow map
	SuperShader::configureShadowShaderArgs	Programmable pipeline shadow map rendering
	Surface::renderShadowMappedLightPass	Render shadow mapped shadows on any model
	beginMarkShadows, markShadows, endMarkShadows	Compute and render stenciled shadow volumes

Image Processing

	VideoInput	Read from AVI, MPG and other video files in real-time
	VideoOutput	Write video files
	Draw::rect2D	Stretch a Texture over a rectangle on screen
	Texture	GPU image representation
	Framebuffer	An "off-screen" rendering surface used for image processing on the GPU
	Image3	RGB floating point image
	Image1	Monochrome floating point image
	Image4	RGBA floating point image
	Image1uint8	8-bit Monochrome image
	Image3uint8	24-bit RGB image
	Image4uint8	32-bit RGBA image
	Color1, Color3, Color4	Floating-point monochrome, RGB, and RGBA color (no clamping)
	Color1uint8, Color3uint8, Color4uint8	8-bit Monochrome, 24-bit RGB, and 32-bit RGBA color (clamped to 0-1 / 0-255)
	GImage	Fast but harder to use mono-8, RGB-24, or RGBA-32 image
	Map2D	Templated image class, e.g., for creating normal maps or arbitrary grids of values
	WrapMode	Specifies how out-of-bounds image locations are treated for Texture, Map2D, and Image classes
	gaussian1D	Generate 1D blur filter coefficients
	GaussianBlur	Fast GPU 1D blur
	ToneMap	Gamma correct, adaptation, and bloom for realistic lighting

String Processing

	beginsWith, endsWith
	format	Convert numbers to strings (a safe sprintf)
	isSlash, isWhiteSpace, isDigit, isNewline, isLetter, isQuote
	stringSplit, stringJoin
	toUpper, toLower	Change case
	trimWhitespace	Remove blanks at the beginning and end of a string
	STR	Macro for creating large blocks of quoted text, usually used with Shader
	TextInput(TextInput::FROM_STRING, ...)	Tokenizer for parsing complex strings

File I/O

	Any	Encodes typed, structured data and can serialize it to a human readable format that is very similar to the Python language's data syntax.
	BinaryInput, BinaryOutput
	TextInput, TextOutput
	getFiles, getDirs	Get a directory listing, including wildcards
	readWholefile, writeWholeFile
	AnyVal	Can hold any common value and read/write tables of named values. Very useful for making configuration files
	copyFile
	createTempFile
	filenameContainsWildcards, filenameBaseExt, filenameExt, filenamePath, pathConcat, parseFilename	Filename parsing and manipulation
	isDirectory, fileIsNewer, fileExists, fileLength	File testing and comparison

Ray Tracing and Physics

Ray tracing and physical simulation both compute intersections between geometric primitives. G3D distinguishes between "moving" collision detection, where two objects are moving with relative constant velocity; and "fixed" detection where where the relative velocity of the objects is zero. The two problems are related. A "moving point" is the same as a fixed ray, a "moving sphere" is a fixed capsule, and so on. Thus for ray tracing one often uses "moving point" collision detection instead of rays (which is reasonable, since ray tracing simulates photons moving around a scene).

	TriTree	Static bounding interval hierarchy for Ray-Tri intersections.
	Intersect
	CollisionDetection	Moving and fixed collisions between many kinds of primitives
	Ray, Sphere, Plane, Box, AABox, Triangle, Tri, Plane, Line, Cylinder, Capsule, Shape	Geometric primitives
	DirectionHistogram	A histogram on the surface of a sphere.
	MeshAlg	Routines for operating on triangle meshes
	KDTree	Axis-aligned binary space partition tree for O(log n) collision detection
	PointKDTree	AABSP tree optimized for zero-extent objects. Primarily used as a photon map
	GCamera::worldRay	Obtain the ray through a pixel
	Image3, Image4	Useful for software rendering output and texture maps
	Vector3::reflectionDirection, Vector3::refractionDirection

Networking

	ReliableConduit	Message-based TCP infrastructure ideal for most games
	NetListener	Server-side way of listening for incoming connections
	BinaryInput, BinaryOutput	Used by serialize/deserialize methods to binary encode messages for transfer.
	NetAddress	IP, port, and hostname addressing
	LightweightConduit	Message-based UDP infrastructure. Allows multi-cast and NAT traversal, but at the cost of unreliable transfer.

Memory and Threads

	GThread	Platform independent thread implementation.
	ThreadSet	Manages a set of threads.
	GMutex	Mutual exclusion lock used for synchronization.
	Spinlock	A mutual exclusion lock that busy-waits when locking.
	AtomicInt32	An integer that may safely be used on different threads without external locking.
	MemoryManager	Abstraction of memory management.
	AlignedMemoryManager	Allocates memory on 16-byte boundaries.
	CRTMemoryManager	MemoryManager implemented using the C runtime.
	AreaMemoryManager	Allocates memory in large blocks and then frees it as an area.