Software Guide

Open Inventor 3D Toolkit

Version: 2.0
Operating System: IRIX 5.2
Machines: All Silicon Graphics

Getting Started

Manual Blurb

Open Inventor is an object-oriented 3D toolkit that offers a comprehensive solution to traditional 3D programming problems. First, it presents a new programming model based on a 3D scene database. This includes a rich set of objects such as cubes, polygons, materials, cameras, lights, trackballs, engines, 3D viewers, and editors that speed up programming time and extend 3D programming capabilities. Second, it provides an innovative event model that paves the way for 3D interaction. In addition, Open Inventor allows you to focus on the applications solution rather than graphics hardware implementation. If the specific object or operation needed for a program does not exist, Open Inventor's object-oriented architecture makes custom additions possible.

Open Inventor matches a programmer's mental model of the task. It is not a 3D graphics toolkit for drawing pictures. Rather, it is a 3D object toolkit for representing a user's 3D physical models and operating on them. Rendering is just one of the many operations that can be applied to a 3D scene or data set.

This new model for 3D object programming makes the programming paradigm simpler and more intuitive. It also makes possible exciting 3D interactivity and flexible program development. For example, Open Inventor's 3D picking returns useful information such as the point of intersection, normal at the point of intersection, the nearest vertex, and more. Furthermore, Inventor does not do picking by redrawing the scene, as many graphics libraries do. Instead, it does picking in software with immense improvements in performance, functionality, and precision. Inventor's event model for 3D objects is designed to help add interactivity to programs. Simply put, any 3D object in a scene can now listen and respond to user input events such as Mouse Down or Key Pressed. This mechanism works exactly like any 2D window system or toolkit that distributes user events to windows or widgets. In the case of Open Inventor, the idea extends to 3D objects. You can now write interactive 3D objects that listen and react to user events.

Inventor includes C++ and C language support, a complete set of C++ and C online man (reference) pages, all of the example code from the Programming Guides, source code for several sample programs, and a few directories of sample 3D data and program binaries.

The Open Inventor 2.0 Developer's Kit is the second MAJOR release of the Inventor 3d toolkit. The first release was called IRIS Inventor 1.0, and used the IRIS Graphics Library (GL) for rendering. This second release uses Open GL, has been licensed to third parties for porting to other platforms, and thus has been renamed "Open Inventor".

Features

• built on top of OpenGL
• defines a standard file format for 3D data interchange
• introduces a simple event model for 3D interaction
• provides animation objects called Engines
• provides high performance object picking
• window system and platform independent
• cross-platform 3D graphics development system
• supports PostScript printing
• encourages programmers to create new customized objects

Help

Documentation

The books are published by Addison-Wesley and available in technical bookstores as well as through SGI. The CD-ROM is available for check-out in Room 209 CoC:

• The Inventor Mentor (hardcopy and on-line via the insight(1) program)
• The Inventor Toolmaker
• On-line Inventor man pages
• OpenInventor Games CD-ROM.

Mail general questions to help@gvu.gatech.edu