Overview

What Is Open Inventor .NET?

Open Inventor .NET™ is a comprehensive .NET developer suite for creating interactive 2D and 3D applications. Built on top of Open Inventor C++ from Mercury, the popular object-oriented 3D toolkit, Open Inventor .NET allows you to use very powerful features across supported platforms with .NET applications. It includes all of the powerful features of Open Inventor for C++ and selected extensions: MeshViz, HardCopy, and VolumeViz.

The components of Open Inventor .NET include:

• Open Inventor - a general-purpose, object-oriented toolkit used to develop interactive 3D graphics applications. The basis for VRML.
• HardCopy - addresses the requirements of applications to support vector hard copy devices, including the ANSI standard CGM, PostScript, and HPGL.
• MeshViz/mesh - addresses the requirements of the scientific and engineering visualization markets. Using MeshViz/mesh, programmers can develop interactive 3D visualizations of contours, isosurfaces, and meshes.
• MeshViz/graph - is a powerful 2D and 3D graphing extension to Open Inventor, which is integrated with VRML standards, allowing applications built using this toolkit to create VRML-compliant charts and graphs for use on the Web, making it possible to distribute business and financial visualizations over the Internet.
• Large Model Visualization - (part of Open Inventor) allows programmers to develop applications that can render very large 3D models of more than one million polygons in real or near real time.
• VRML - (part of Open Inventor) implements the VRML 2.0 specification (now VRML97) as an extension to Open Inventor. It enables developers to take advantage of VRML in a broad range of simulation and virtual reality applications, including science and engineering.
• VolumeViz - extension for visualizing volume data.

The MeshViz packages implement powerful extension nodes to Open Inventor. These extensions give you access to functionality that will speed up your development, including extended capabilities for 2D and 3D drawing and charting, and an amazing set of classes to develop, in a flash, viewers for business, technical, or scientific data.

Main Namespaces

MC.Inventor.*

The popular multi-purpose 3D toolkit Open Inventor made available for .NET developers, including:

• MC.Inventor.Nodes - building blocks to describe graphics contents (the scene)
• MC.Inventor.Actions - actions you can apply to scenes (render, pick, get bounds,...)
• MC.Inventor.Collision - extended collision detection
• MC.inventor.Draggers - smart graphics objects that users can control using the mouse
• MC.inventor.Manipulators - manipulators allow the user to transform scene objects
• MC.Inventor.Sensors - respond to data changes in the scene graph or the passing of time
• MC.Inventor.Engines - high-level animation and constraint definition
• MC.Inventor.VRMLNodes - VRML 2.0/97 extended support
• ...

MC.Hardcopy.*

This extension extends the Open Inventor actions to allow your application to output your visualization in a resolution-independent vector format. Core Open Inventor can generate a bitmap image of your graphics scene, which is like taking a snapshot of your screen. With HardCopy you can create vectorized output in CGM, HPGL, and PostScript file formats. With CGM output you can plug your data into a wide range of other software. With HPGL or PostScript format, you can produce high quality, large format paper output. HardCopy allows you to configure the output to meet your printing requirements.

MC.Meshviz.Graph

This extension extends Open Inventor capabilities in the following areas:

• 2D drawing: Open Inventor only provides 3D shape nodes. With this first set of extensions, you are able to design your 2D graphic applications very easily and efficiently. This includes simple 2D shapes, such as rectangles, circles, or arrows, 2D charting nodes to draw a large range of different 2D axes (linear, logarithmic, angular, time...), curves or markers fields, statistical nodes using pie or bar chart representations, error areas, high-low close, etc.
• 3D drawing: The previous classes are extended in 3D. For example, 3D circles, 3D pie charts and bar charts, 3D curves, 3D axes... These nodes give you access to a wide range of new 3D functionality.
• Legends: a wide variety of legends are provided to explain your visualizations.

MC.Meshviz.Data

This extension provides you with all the nodes you may need to develop your post-processing scientific visualization. Meshviz.Data allows you to "mine" your data. Certainly the best way to understand, explain or distribute your scientific results is to visualize them. Meshviz.Data can deal with whatever type of meshes you may have -- 2D or 3D meshes, Cartesian, spherical, cylindrical, triangular, hexahedral, structured, or indexed. 2D and 3D contouring and cross-sectioning are also provided.

MC.VolumeViz.*

This extension for visualizing volume data provides the tools to visualize and explore volume data using a variety of techniques. Preliminary exploration is often done using slices and opaque subvolumes (called volume skin in VolumeViz). VolumeViz also allows mapping volume data onto arbitrary geometry, for example, a multi-slice "fence". And, of course, VolumeViz provides hardware accelerated direct volume rendering using 2D or 3D textures or the VolumePro™ board from TeraRecon.

An optional Large Data Management (LDM) feature allows very large volumes, even hundreds of gigabytes, to be navigated with interactive performance even on relatively low-end machines like laptops.

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