Iron Claw

The Iron Claw Engine has been my last approach in creating a 3D game engine on my own. It was also by far the most advanced engine I have written. I applied techniques that were considered state of the art in realtime 3D graphics at that time (2008 – 2012).

The editor application provides what‐you‐see‐is‐what‐you‐get viewports.
Extensibility is achieved by a simple plugin system.

Making use of the geometry clipmap algorithm (by Hugues Hoppe) and a wavelet compression scheme, the engine is capable of handling large terrain sizes. Decompression takes place on multiple threads concurrently.
Runtime-generated impostor billboards for structural objects allow to create complex scenes with arbitrary geometry. Development of the engine came to a halt in 2012.

Main features:
  • Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 3 support
  • Terrain editing / rendering including LoD and compression / decompression at runtime (Geo Clipmaps)
  • Deferred lighting
  • Variance shadow maps for the terrain
  • Percentage closer filtering shadow maps for structural objects
  • Material system including normal and parallax mapping
  • Ocean water
  • Day / night cycle
  • Impostor billboards
  • Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
  • Screen Space Light Shaft Rendering
  • B-spline tree vegetation
Demo Videos