Why call it Panda3D

Panda3D stands for "Platform Agnostic Networked Display Architecture"

Timeline

1997-2000

Earlier product DWD (Disney's World Designer) was used to create DisneyQuest Virtual Reality Attractions

2000

The Disney VR Studio embarked on the Toontown Online project and enhanced DWD to become Panda3D

2002

Disney's VR Studio decided to make the engine open source

Interactive Scripting

The back-end system is done in C++, then a with a C-API creation tool called "Interrogate" (similar to SWIG) helps produce the scripting language interface. Originally "Squeak" then "Python" but built such that it could be any language that is capable of calling a C API. The goal was to have a "late binding scripting" language, like Scheme, Python, Smalltalk.

Features:

• Multiple underlying rendering APIs: DirectX/OpenGL
• Python scripting interface
• Programming on the fly using interactive scripting in the Python shell
• Extensibility using Python modules
• Custom 3D file format, Egg, with exporters for 3D Studio Max and Maya
• Soft skin animation and a sophisticated actor interface for character animation
• DIRECT Tools for GUI-based scene editing
• Particle Effects API and GUI-based particle panel
• Lighting, fog, and animated textures
• Sound using the FMOD library
• Multithreading, event handling, message passing, and finite state machines
• Functions for interpolation, sequencing, and parallelization
• Modules for magnetic tracking for virtual reality
• Input device interfaces
• Extensive scenegraph manipulation modules

Walk through example

"/usr/share/panda3d/samples/Basic-Tutorials--Lesson-1-Solar-System/intro.html"

Reference links:

The Panda3D homepage (http://www.panda3d.org)

http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/29/

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall02/cs526/papers/panda.pdf

Alternatives:

http://www.ogre3d.org/