Integrating the Beast API

This page and its sub-topics detail how to integrate the Beast API into your own project. This typically involves the following steps:

In order to use the functions and data structures in the Beast API in your application, you need to set up your code project with access to the Beast headers, libraries and binaries. For details on these requirements, see Setting Up Your Project.
At each place in your code that you want to use the Beast API to light a scene, you need to perform a couple of basic initialization steps. Similarly, each time you finish using the Beast API, you need to release the allocated resources. For details, see Initializing and Terminating Beast.
For each world or level that you want to light using Beast, you need to use the Beast API to set up a scene: a representation of the geometry, materials, textures and light sources that will be taken into account during the rendering. For details, see Creating a Scene.
Once your scene is set up with all the objects in your world, you need to use the Beast API to specify what kind of lighting information you want to retrieve, and how the rendering job should be carried out. You need to create a rendering job, which packages up your scene and other input information, and run the rendering job. For details, see Rendering the Scene.
Finally, once the rendering job has been completed successfully, you can retrieve the lighting data you requested and process it as needed in order for it to be used by your game engine at runtime. For details, see Retrieving the Rendered Output.

The steps described in the sub-topics linked above assume for the most part that your own project is written in C or C++. However, you can use the Beast API from a different programming language such as Python. For additional information, see Programming in Non-C Languages.

Integrating the Beast API

Topics in this section