Beginning with HOOPS Luminate

Welcome to HOOPS Luminate! You’re just about to create high quality graphics: 2D, 3D, photorealism… everything in a single package. This book will guide you through the very first steps in working with HOOPS Luminate and gives entry points to more detailed sections of the documentation.

So, let’s start!

What Do I Need?

HOOPS Luminate has no dependencies. It means that to develop with HOOPS Luminate, you only need to get the include files and one library: REDCore. Those libraries come already compiled for Windows x64, Linux x64, and Mac OS x64. Additional libraries may be needed for some specific functions. See Deployment for details.

HOOPS Luminate is a C++ API, meaning that it can be used out-of-the-box to start writing C/C++ applications immediately with it. At the price of writing (or generating) a wrapper, it can also be used with a lot of other languages.

HOOPS Luminate comes with a huge amount of documentation material including reference manual, programming guide and tutorials. The tutorials are already compiled for every supported platforms but you can recompile them at your will by using CMake and the provided CMakeLists.txt.

Finding Information

HOOPS Luminate covers all the graphics needs and therefore may look a little bit complex to new users. But don’t be afraid, the dozens of tutorials and the brand new documentation system are here to guide you through your journey.

The entry point to all your requests is the documentation system. Just select from the provided categories or search for keywords to get access to hundreds of pages.

The documentation is divided in four categories:

  • Books Books are collections of information on one subject;

  • Tutorials are example implementations demonstrating one (or a few) HOOPS Luminate feature(s) at a time;

  • Tasks are code excerpts which demonstrate the implementation of an atomic task with HOOPS Luminate;

  • The API Reference is the HOOPS Luminate reference manual and lists all the API methods, functions and data structures.

What is HOOPS Luminate Capable Of?

HOOPS Luminate aims at providing you solution to your rendering needs. HOOPS Luminate embeds both a real-time rendering engine and a software rendering engine. You can get a quick overview of HOOPS Luminate’s feature set here: HOOPS Luminate Features at a Glance.

Starting with HOOPS Luminate

Included in the package is a small, light-weight Qt framework which enables you to start very quickly prototyping with HOOPS Luminate. It’s cross-platform and handles for you the creation and the management of a windowed application with tool bars, menus and commands. It natively encapsulates a pre-built HOOPS Luminate view to start rendering immediately.

All the tutorials are written using that framework. To learn more about starting with the framework, please have a look at First App.

Then, you’ll need some knowledge of HOOPS Luminate fundamentals, so be sure to take a look at the Building a HOOPS Luminate Application book.

The HOOPS Luminate Scene Graph Overview book covers the details of data creation and management with HOOPS Luminate.

The creation and manipulation of materials and images is covered in the Building HOOPS Luminate Materials and HOOPS Luminate Textures and Images books.

Finally, the Rendering with HOOPS Luminate book will teach you all the rendering techniques available in HOOPS Luminate.

Note

HOOPS Luminate is a living product and as so, new versions come regularly. We strongly encourage you to look at the Release Notes page each time a new version is released to clearly understand what has been changed and how you can best migrate your existing code.