Irrlicht Engine

Hello!

I'm not a complete newbie to Irrlicht, allthough it's been quite a while since I used it and it has moved on quite a bit since then. I hope you guys can give me some pointers....

I'd like to make a dll that renders to a bitmap that I then can use from another program. I do not wish to render to any kind of visible area on screen. I have come down to two possible solutions using the Irrlicht engine and I'd like to know if any of them is plausible:

1. Render to texture. I've read and understood that the engine nowadays renders to texture. Is it possible to get hold of the bitmap that is rendered to the texture? Basically is it possible to get the bitmap of a texture?

2. The example featuring rendering to a windows application could maybe be used, by using nonvisible components.

Any suggestions, or other ideas? Has anybody done anything like this?

All help and tips greatly appreciated.

Render to Texture works, yes, however there is currently no way of getting that texture saved back to disk that exist in Irrlicht.

In Windows, the GDI process of screen capturing is very slow, and that's how you have to get screenshots using Windows. DirectX ( or OpenGL I believe ) have no built in ways to get a screenshot. It's dependent on the window you're using.