Useful Links for Open Inventor Developers
Open Inventor User Forum
The Open Inventor Forum is the place where Open Inventor community discussion happens.
Sharing experiences and information from user to user can be the best way to take full advantage
of Open Inventor in your application.
The Mercury Visualization Sciences Team is actively participating in the forum and we
hope to meet you there!
General (Old) Open Inventor Information
General Graphics Information
If you can't do something directly in Open Inventor, there's
a good chance you will find an algorithm or at least an explanation in one
of these links. Then you can create a custom node or action to implement the
feature you need. If it's simply a matter of making some OpenGL calls directly,
you might be able to just use an SoCallback node. See the next section for
more OpenGL info.
- Graphics Algorithms news group: comp.graphics.algorithms
- Graphics Algorithms FAQ
- More links (ACM TOG)
From here you can get to the Graphics Gems repository, Dave Eberly's site
and lots of other interesting (and potentially useful) stuff.
General OpenGL Information
One of the great things about Open Inventor is that you
know OpenGL is always the rendering layer underneath and you know you are
allowed to make your own calls to OpenGL (with reasonable precautions) to
access features that are not directly supported by Open Inventor. The following
links have lots of information about OpenGL features and algorithms.
- OpenGL website
- OpenGL news group: comp.graphics.api.opengl
- Mesa
Mesa is an open source graphics API essentially identical to OpenGL.
Platform Specific OpenGL Information
The performance and, in some cases, the appearance of
an Open Inventor application is strongly affected by the characteristics (features
and quirks) of each OpenGL implementation and of the graphics hardware. This
section provides some links to information about specific OpenGL implementations
and specific hardware. This is not a comprehensive list of vendors, only some
links that are known to contain OpenGL specific information (features supported,
performance hints, etc). Please check your vendor's website.
In general, always make sure you have the latest drivers
and patches for whatever OpenGL and hardware you are using. Some vendors,
for example NVIDIA, provide detailed OpenGL specific information on their
website.
3D Stereo Information
Open Inventor 2.5 and earlier support stereo viewing when
using a 3D board with OpenGL "quadbuffer" stereo support in hardware (see
the link below for a list of boards with hardware stereo support). However
these older versions of Open Inventor implement the left/right stereo images
by rotating the left/right cameras (the "twisted eyeballs" model). This approach
only produces a correct stereo image near the point of focus (where the lines
of sight from the two cameras intersect).
Open Inventor 2.5.2 and later releases implement the left/right
stereo images using the correct "asymmetric frustum" model and provide control
over both camera separation and parallax. Open Inventor 2.5.2 and later also
support a large number of "software" stereo formats, including horizontal
and vertical interlaced, horizontal and vertical side-by-side, red/cyan color
separation, and so on. This allows Open Inventor applications to do stereo
rendering on a wide range of devices from red/green glasses to the VRex stereo
projector.