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Open Inventor
Open Inventor is an object-oriented toolkit for developing interactive, 3D graphics applications. It also defines a standard file format for exchanging 3D data among applications. Open Inventor serves as the basis for the VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) standard.
Open Inventor is an object-oriented 3D toolkit offering a comprehensive solution to interactive graphics programming problems. It presents a programming model based on a 3D scene database that dramatically simplifies graphics programming. It includes a rich set of objects such as cubes, polygons, text, materials, cameras, lights, trackballs, handle boxes, 3D viewers, and editors that speed up your programming time and extend your 3D programming capabilities.
Open Inventor:
- is 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
- is window system and platform independent
- is a cross-platform 3D graphics development system
- supports PostScript printing
- encourages programmers to create new customized objects
- is fun to use
Inventor is for programmers writing 3D applications, and does not directly provide any way for users to create 3D objects. Several Inventor applications have been written that create 3D objects. Showcase 3.0, which is bundled with IRIX, is a fairly simple example. A much more sophisticated modeller called Ez3d built on top of Inventor is available from Radiance Software International.
... The first Inventor product release, IRIS Inventor 1.0, used the IRIS Graphics Library (GL) for rendering (around 1990). The second (and last) major release, Open Inventor 2.0, was based on OpenGL, has been licensed to third parties for porting to other platforms, and thus has been renamed "Open Inventor" (around 1994)
... Open Inventor 2.0 became available under IRIX 5.2 (requiring also OpenGL and the IRIS Development Option); it ran on all SGI platforms except Personal Iris with G/TG graphics and systems with VGX(T)/GT(X) graphics. The last update (Open Inventor 2.1.7) was provided with Irix 6.5.25 (2004)
... Open Inventor became open-source freeware in 2000 [under GNU Lesser GPL 2.1]. At the time of this writing, the latest available version is 2.1.5-10 <ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/inventor/download/>; it can be compiled with minimal efforts under SGI MipsPro 7.4.4
... Since Open Inventor has been licensed to run on other platforms, the Addison-Wesley Publishing Company has released books - copyrighted by Silicon Graphics, Inc. - that describe Open Inventor independent of the platform it runs on as follows:
The Inventor Mentor: Programming Object-Oriented 3D Graphics with Open Inventor, Release 2 [December 1993; ISBN 0-201-62495-8]. Also available on the SGI Open Inventor 2.0 CD-ROM
The Inventor Toolmaker: Extending Opem Inventor, Release 2 [April 1994; ISBN 0-201-62493-1]. Also available on the SGI Open Inventor 2.0.1 CD-ROM
Open Inventor C++ Reference Manual: The Official Reference Document for Open Inventor, Release 2 [July 1994; ISBN 0-201-62491-5]
... As a show-case for Open Inventor 2.0, SGI released an Open Inventor Games CD-ROM, including source (1994; product number 812-0113-001) [Note: there might have been more SGI Open Inventor Games CDs - but I'm uncertain about that. End of Note].
... While, in SGI's Inventor products, the "scene graph" is a basic paradigma, several other later "Inventor-style" open-source packages are based on the same idea as well:
- Coin: http://www.coin3d.org/
- OpenSceneGraph: http://www.openscenegraph.org/
- OpenSG: http://www.opensg.org/
References
- Introducing Open Inventor. Silicon Graphics Pipeline July/August 1994
- Extending Open Inventor. Silicon Graphics Pipeline January/February 1995
See Also
- Open Inventor 2.1 Porting and Performance Tips (document number: 007-3078-001)
- Open Inventor C++ Reference Pages (document number: 860-0108-001)
- Open Inventor: How to Write an Open Inventor File Translator (document number: 007-2468-001)
- Open Inventor: Nodes Quick Reference (document number: 007-2469-001)
External Resources
- https://web.archive.org/web/19970706224706/http://www.sgi.com/Technology/Inventor/bugs.html - bug fixes and workarounds