The rendering is performed using a basic D3D10 renderer. A little rough looking perhaps, but I plan eventually to use a deferred renderer from my graphics module, however this current system is flexible enough and will allow me to visualise experiments.
As the project will end focusing on control over the vegetation system, I will need the ability to rapidly prototype user controls. I plan to use the DirectX UI system that is included in many of the DirectX SDK examples, as the controls seem flexible and should be quick to implement.
The mesh loading is done using an open source model library, going by the name Assimp. After integrating it into the project I found myself less than pleased with results. The library is fairly well designed, consistent and also boasts a large variety of import formats, unfortunately it appears to have some very severe and undermining flaws. The dragon shown in the screen capture to the left took a good minute or so to load, more complex scenes such as Sponza take far longer and every model loaded leaves a 7kb memory leak! For now I will keep the library and work with simple models, however I shall be looking out for an alternative. The vegetation system will require more complex scenes for analysis and waiting several minutes to gather results is just not a viable option.
