Irrlicht Engine Tutorial

| Tutorial 8. Special Effects
This tutorials describes how to do special effects. It shows how to use stencil buffer shadows, the particle system, billboards, dynamic light and the water surface scene node. The program which is described here will look like this:

Lets start!
We start like in some tutorials before. Please note that this time, the 'shadows' flag in createDevice() is set to true, for we want to have a dynamic shadow casted from an animated character. If your this example runs to slow, set it to false. The Irrlicht Engine checks if your hardware doesn't support the stencil buffer, and disables shadows by itself, but just in case the demo runs slow on your hardware.
    #include <irrlicht.h>
    #include <iostream>

    using namespace irr;

    #pragma comment(lib, "Irrlicht.lib")

    int main()
    {
      // ask user for driver
      video::E_DRIVER_TYPE driverType;

      printf("Please select the driver you want for this example:\n"\
        " (a) Direct3D 9.0c\n (b) Direct3D 8.1\n (c) OpenGL 1.5\n"\
        " (d) Software Renderer\n (e) Apfelbaum Software Renderer\n"\
        " (f) NullDevice\n (otherKey) exit\n\n");

      char i;
      std::cin >> i;

      switch(i)
      {
        case 'a': driverType = video::EDT_DIRECT3D9;break;
        case 'b': driverType = video::EDT_DIRECT3D8;break;
        case 'c': driverType = video::EDT_OPENGL;   break;
        case 'd': driverType = video::EDT_SOFTWARE; break;
        case 'e': driverType = video::EDT_BURNINGSVIDEO;break;
        case 'f': driverType = video::EDT_NULL;     break;
        default: return 1;
      }

      // create device and exit if creation failed
      IrrlichtDevice *device = createDevice(driverType,
        core::dimension2d<s32>(640, 480), 16, false, true);

      if (device == 0)
        return 1;

     video::IVideoDriver* driver = device->getVideoDriver();
     scene::ISceneManager* smgr = device->getSceneManager();
For our environment, we load a .3ds file. It is a small room I modelled with Anim8or and exported it into the 3ds format because the Irrlicht Engine did not support the .an8 format when I wrote this tutorial. I am a very bad 3d graphic artist, and so the texture mapping is not very nice in this model. Luckily I am a better programmer than artist, and so the Irrlicht Engine is able to create a cool texture mapping for me: Just use the mesh manipulator and create a planar texture mapping for the mesh. If you want to see the mapping I made with Anim8or, uncomment this line. I also did not figure out how to set the material right in Anim8or, it has a specular light color which I don't really like. I'll switch it off too with this code.
    	scene::IAnimatedMesh* mesh = smgr->getMesh(
    		"../../media/room.3ds");

    	smgr->getMeshManipulator()->makePlanarTextureMapping(
    		mesh->getMesh(0), 0.008f);

    	scene::ISceneNode* node = 0;

    	node = smgr->addAnimatedMeshSceneNode(mesh);
    	node->setMaterialTexture(0,	driver->getTexture("../../media/wall.jpg"));
    	node->getMaterial(0).SpecularColor.set(0,0,0,0);
Now, for the first special effect: Animated water. It works like this: The WaterSurfaceSceneNode takes a mesh as input and makes it wave like a water surface. And if we let this scene node use a nice material like the MT_REFLECTION_2_LAYER, it looks really cool. We are doing this with the next few lines of code. As input mesh, we create a hill plane mesh, without hills. But any other mesh could be used for this, you could even use the room.3ds (which would look really strange) if you wanted to.
    	mesh = smgr->addHillPlaneMesh("myHill",
    		core::dimension2d<f32>(20,20),
    		core::dimension2d<s32>(40,40), 0, 0,
    		core::dimension2d<f32>(0,0),
    		core::dimension2d<f32>(10,10));

    	node = smgr->addWaterSurfaceSceneNode(mesh->getMesh(0), 3.0f, 300.0f, 30.0f);
    	node->setPosition(core::vector3df(0,7,0));

    	node->setMaterialTexture(0,	driver->getTexture("../../media/stones.jpg"));
    	node->setMaterialTexture(1,	driver->getTexture("../../media/water.jpg"));

    	node->setMaterialType(video::EMT_REFLECTION_2_LAYER);
The second special effect is very basic, I bet you saw it already in some Irrlicht Engine demos: A transparent billboard combined with a dynamic light. We simply create a light scene node, let it fly around, an to make it look more cool, we attach a billboard scene node to it.
    	// create light

    	node = smgr->addLightSceneNode(0, core::vector3df(0,0,0),
    		video::SColorf(1.0f, 0.6f, 0.7f, 1.0f), 600.0f);
    	scene::ISceneNodeAnimator* anim = 0;
    	anim = smgr->createFlyCircleAnimator (core::vector3df(0,150,0),250.0f);
    	node->addAnimator(anim);
    	anim->drop();

    	// attach billboard to light

    	node = smgr->addBillboardSceneNode(node, core::dimension2d<f32>(50, 50));
    	node->setMaterialFlag(video::EMF_LIGHTING, false);
    	node->setMaterialType(video::EMT_TRANSPARENT_ADD_COLOR);
    	node->setMaterialTexture(0,	driver->getTexture("../../media/particlewhite.bmp"));
The next special effect is a lot more interesting: A particle system. The particle system in the Irrlicht Engine is quit modular and extensible and yet easy to use. There is a particle system scene node into which you can put particle emitters, which make particles come out of nothing. These emitters are quite flexible and usually have lots of parameters like direction, amount and color of the particles they should create. There are different emitters, for example a point emitter which lets particles pop out at a fixed point. If the particle emitters available in the engine are not enough for you, you can easily create your own ones, you'll simply have to create a class derived from the IParticleEmitter interface and attach it to the particle system using setEmitter(). In this example we create a box particle emitter, which creates particles randomly inside a box. The parameters define the box, direction of the particles, minimal and maximal new particles per second, color and minimal and maximal livetime of the particles. Because only with emitters particle system would be a little bit boring, there are particle affectors, which modify particles during they fly around. They can be added to the particle system, simulating additional effects like gravity or wind. The particle affector we use in this example is an affector, which modifies the color of the particles: It lets them fade out. Like the particle emitters, additional particle affectors can also be implemented by you, simply derive a class from IParticleAffector and add it with addAffector(). After we set a nice material to the particle system, we have a cool looking camp fire. By adjusting material, texture, particle emitter and affector parameters, it is also easily possible to create smoke, rain, explosions, snow, and so on.
    	scene::IParticleSystemSceneNode* ps = 0;
    	ps = smgr->addParticleSystemSceneNode(false);
    	ps->setPosition(core::vector3df(-70,60,40));
    	ps->setScale(core::vector3df(2,2,2));

    	ps->setParticleSize(core::dimension2d<f32>(20.0f, 10.0f));

    	scene::IParticleEmitter* em = ps->createBoxEmitter(
    		core::aabbox3d<f32>(-7,0,-7,7,1,7),
    		core::vector3df(0.0f,0.03f,0.0f),
    		80,100,
    		video::SColor(0,255,255,255), video::SColor(0,255,255,255),
    		800,2000);

    	ps->setEmitter(em);
    	em->drop();

    	scene::IParticleAffector* paf =
    		ps->createFadeOutParticleAffector();

    	ps->addAffector(paf);
    	paf->drop();

    	ps->setMaterialFlag(video::EMF_LIGHTING, false);
    	ps->setMaterialTexture(0, driver->getTexture("../../media/particle.bmp"));
    	ps->setMaterialType(video::EMT_TRANSPARENT_VERTEX_ALPHA);
As our last special effect, we want a dynamic shadow be casted from an animated character. For this we load a DirectX .x model and place it into our world. For creating the shadow, we simply need to call addShadowVolumeSceneNode(). The color of shadows is only adjustable globally for all shadows, by calling ISceneManager::setShadowColor(). Voila, here is our dynamic shadow. Because the character is a little bit too small for this scene, we make it bigger using setScale(). And because the character is lighted by a dynamic light, we need to normalize the normals to make the lighting on it correct. This is always necessary if the scale of a dynamic lighted model is not (1,1,1). Otherwise it would get too dark or too bright because the normals will be scaled too.
    	mesh = smgr->getMesh("../../media/dwarf.x");
    	scene::IAnimatedMeshSceneNode* anode = 0;

    	anode = smgr->addAnimatedMeshSceneNode(mesh);
    	anode->setPosition(core::vector3df(-50,20,-60));
    	anode->setAnimationSpeed(15);

    	// add shadow
    	anode->addShadowVolumeSceneNode();
    	smgr->setShadowColor(video::SColor(220,0,0,0));

    	// make the model a little bit bigger and normalize its normals
    	// because of this for correct lighting
    	anode->setScale(core::vector3df(2,2,2));
    	anode->setMaterialFlag(video::EMF_NORMALIZE_NORMALS, true);
Finally we simply have to draw everything, that's all.
    	scene::ICameraSceneNode* camera = smgr->addCameraSceneNodeFPS();
    	camera->setPosition(core::vector3df(-50,50,-150));

    	int lastFPS = -1;

    	while(device->run())
    	{
    		driver->beginScene(true, true, 0);

    		smgr->drawAll();

    		driver->endScene();

    		int fps = driver->getFPS();

    		if (lastFPS != fps)
    		{
    		  core::stringw str = L"Irrlicht Engine - SpecialFX example [";
    		  str += driver->getName();
    		  str += "] FPS:";
    		  str += fps;

    		  device->setWindowCaption(str.c_str());
    		  lastFPS = fps;
    		}
    	}

    	device->drop();

    	return 0;
    }