Simplest way to generate+render inanimate stick figures?

[djulien]

I am wanting to render a scene consisting of up to a few dozen inanimate objects that are mostly just geometric shapes such as cones, cylinders, cubes, etc (not people or animals), and then rotate/zoom/move it around with the mouse like in the MeshViewer demo (example #9). The shapes would be something like structures made out of toothpicks that are glued together (not solid surfaces), and have many small light sources all over them (up to, say, 400 - 2000 or so little light sources on each). I would prefer to generate the view dynamically from a text or xml file describing the objects, not from a pre-drawn game engine file. I don't need to show shadows or interactions between light sources from different angles, although that would be cool I suppose.

I've looked thru the demos/examples, and I'm not clear on what the most appropriate approach to this would be. It seems like many of the demos read a Quake3 or other pre-designed map file and then render that, but that is way overkill for what I'm trying to do. Is Irrlicht the right choice for just drawing a bunch of "toothpicks" with little lights on them dynamically? Based on the impressive set of demos, it seems like it could handle that quite well, but I am not sure if it would be awkward to create and pass in all the vertices, nodes, lights, etc into the API dynamically, or I should just use an external game engine to do that and then only do rendering with Irrlicht.

Looking for advice - should I try to create the sticks and lights dynamically directly in Irrlicht, or will I need to tackle a longer learning curve for a game engine as well?

don

[kklouzal]

Everything you want to do here is well within the bounds of Irrlicht, however the amount of lights your proposing might be an issue, why so many?

[djulien]

> Everything you want to do here is well within the bounds of Irrlicht,

Great! Thanks for confirming.

> however the amount of lights your proposing might be an issue, why so many?

I would like to render an interactive 3D model of a Christmas light display. It uses 1000s of LEDs, and it would be very cool to simulate the display visually when designing it. I was thinking that I might be able to use Irrlicht for that purpose.

If the number of light sources is too many for Irrlicht, maybe I can just represent them as sprites, similar to the 2D Graphics demo (tutorial #6), but in 3D instead of 2D. Would Irrlicht handle that many sprites well, or should I keep searching for a different approach?

don

[hybrid]

Rendering them as separate sprites is within reach for the engine and a faster graphics card. But due to the many single draw calls it would be better to prepare some batched buffer or some textured plane to place the lights.