Cumulonimbus Engine

The Cumulonimbus Engine is a rendering engine written in C++ / OpenGL. It allows programmers to create and update dynamic scenes with a variety of effects and features. All effects and features can be enabled, disabled and modified, and additional effects can be added. It has a simple and powerful API that makes object management, animation and rendering easy - allowing you to worry about the application itself - be it a game, design or visualization application. Currently, the Engine is being used for the game, Aero Empire.

Cumulonimbus Engine in action - a sunrise/sunset scene from the game, Aero Empire:

The Cumulonimbus Engine supports the following features:

• Volumetric Clouds - The engine can render uniform density, closed 3D meshes as participating media. This allows for much cleaner, accurate clouds (and other participating media) than particle approaches. Shading for clouds is added as an optional post processing effect.
• Image Space Lighting - The engine can handle hundreds of small, dim point lights in the scene, as well as the main and secondary light sources. These can be dynamically changed, and are perfect for lanterns, lamp posts, headlights, towns at night, and other such scenes.
• Atmospheric and Celestial Effects - The engine supports atmospheric scattering, aerial perspective, god rays, stars and a moon. The engine also supports celestial effects like eclipses (both lunar and solar).
• Shadows - The engine has an implementation of PSSM which allows for crisp shadows even in large scenes. The shadow quality can be set to improve crispness of shadows.
• Non Photo Realistic (NPR) shading - The engine supports cell shading, colored silhouette lines and can also process models, adding ridge and crease lines. These effects can be enabled or disabled based on the application.
• Particle Effects - The engine has an API for creating and animating particle effects. It is up to the user to program the movement pattern for the particle effects. The particles are soft particles and are integrated with all effects (aerial perspective and volumetric medium).
• Deformable Animation API - The engine supports per-object transformations, as well as deforming animations.
• Other Features: Alpha Mapping, Normal Mapping, Double-sided polygons (with correct lighting), Two-sided lighting.

The engine itself is done, only some API changes and documentation is required for an official release. However, Aerosphere Studios is currently putting it's effort into releasing the game, Aero Empire, so a specific release date is undecided.

More information, documentation and specific details will be added when the engine released.

A non-commercial version for personal use, trial of the engine, and non-commercial ventures is also planned, and will be available when the engine is released.