Open Inventor also defines a standard 3-D file format (ASCII and binary) for scene interchange, 3-D viewers are provided with Open Inventor allowing scenes to be developed as ASCII files and viewed without direct use of programming.
Books available at present include: The Open Inventor Reference C++ Manual, the Open Inventor Toolmaker and The Open Inventor Mentor.
A proposal from ANSI was considered at the recent ISO graphics meeting of SC24 to create a 3-D metafile standard based on the Open Inventor file format. This will be progressed.
Converters for most 3-D file formats to Open Inventor form have either been developed or are under development.
VRML is gaining rapid acceptance, both because of the amount of pre-existing (Open Inventor) geometry and also because of the provision of a free viewer (WebSpace) from SGI and TGS. VRML is actually a subset of the Open Inventor ASCII file format with two extensions for the handling of WWW links.
A VRML object is downloaded over the web as a scene description and rendering takes place locally on the users machine, this greatly reduces the bandwidth requirements and enables the user to easily fly through the scene on their local machine. Objects within the scene can be hot-links to other VRML, HTML (or other) WWW resources and a VRML include capability is provided to allow libraries of objects to be created and used. VRML 1.0 is stable, and work on defining the next revision is underway. The draft specification is at:
For further information see links from:
http://www.nag.co.uk/visual/IE/iecbb/VRML.html
Some very interesting research and development using VRML, IRIS Explorer and the web can be seen at the URL:
Main web reference at: http://www.besoft.com/
BE stands for Behavior Engine. The Behavior Engine supports the creation of a kind of active document which embeds 3D interactive simulations. These documents are authored in an extension of HTML, and use Open Inventor for 3D representation and rendering. The documents, including their 3D simulation content, can be distributed on WWW. The initial implementation of the system is based on Open Inventor though the system is not directly Open Inventor based.
Showcase (the presentation system) from SGI includes Open Inventor generation, display and manipulation capabilities. The Ez3d modeller from Radiance Software International assists in the generation of Open Inventor scenes.
Open Inventor is always supplied with viewers that allow geometry files to be read and displayed. The scenes may be manipulated within the display to change viewpoint, lights, rendering and material properties.
SGI continue to distribute their own implementation of Open Inventor, implementations for other platforms are emerging from Portable Graphics (Sun, HP, IBM RS/6000, Linux,), Template Graphics Systems (Sun, HP, DEC, IBM RS/6000, Windows NT, Windows 3.1, Macintosh,) and NetPower Inc (Windows NT). The TGS products are available in the UK through NAG Ltd.
A limited Fortran and C interface to Open Inventor is provided within the IRIS Explorer API so that user defined functions to manipulate geometries can be produced.
Robert Iles
The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd
Wilkinson House
Jordon Hill Road
Oxford
OX2 8DR
R.M.J.Iles@nag.co.uk