My basic problem is to generate 2d renders of 3d objects, such as one could accomplish with openGL or DirectX. However I have no interest in displaying the rendered objects to the screen, only to generate the shaded/ textured/ rotated images as bitmaps (not necessarily written to disk). This process is likely to be a problematic bottleneck in my design, so I would prefer to keep my solution as compact as possible (ie, don’t waste the time sending the image to the screen), and would be most pleased if I could make use of hardware-accelerated rendering. Does anyone know of a convenient library or tool to help in this?
Right now I would prefer a C/C++ option, however speed is what I’m going for, so I’m willing to deal with ASM/ super optimized anything if it gets what I want the fastest.
What you need is a so called technique “rendering to texture”. With OpenGL you can do it very easy. Take a look at example here: http://www.songho.ca/opengl/gl_fbo.html#example