Did you know?

Everything you always wanted to know about Open Inventor
(but were too busy to find)

Open Inventor by VSG provides an extremely rich set of features including more than 1,500 classes providing numerous services. Open Inventor is also constantly evolving and major new releases are regularly provided, expanding the current tool set and delivering new features.

You might have missed, or just not found, the classes that provide that key feature you just now need to implement or maybe a feature that so far has only been on the “wish list” for your application. This section highlights some of the most commonly “missed” features of Open Inventor and its extensions. We welcome your suggestions! What features do you think are the “hidden gems” in Open Inventor?

This section is updated monthly, and we encourage you to visit it regularly, or better to subscribe to our monthly Tech Brief, where new 'Did you know' topics are exposed. More generally, we encourage you even more to visit and discuss with the Open Inventor community on www.openinventor.net, where you will certainly find useful answers and suggestions on features you are looking for!

Open Inventor does 3D projections!

 Open Inventor provides a general mechanism for “projection” of 3D coordinates. And we don’t mean projecting on the wall or the graphics pipeline perspective projection. A projection is any...

Open Inventor can detect collisions!

Collision detection means detecting when two or more objects intersect or overlap in 3D space. It is useful in walk-through applications (to keep the user from walking through walls), in...

Open Inventor can make movies!

Open Inventor can record a sequence of rendered images directly to an MPEG format video file. Interactive 3D applications are built to allow objects to move and change on the screen....

Open Inventor supports file compression!

Since version 8.1, Open Inventor-based applications can directly read and write Zlib compressed Open Inventor (.iv) files. This can dramatically reduce the disk space required for large...

Open Inventor can render directly to a printer!

On Microsoft Windows®, Open Inventor®’s HardCopy extension can render your 3D scene directly to any printer or plotter device supported by Windows. We don...

Open Inventor can make 3D PDF files!

 In Acrobat™ 7.0, Adobe added the ability to include 3D geometry in their popular PDF format. This makes it possible to publish a version of your 3D models, scenes and...

Open Inventor fields can be connected!

If you are using Open Inventor to build an application, then you are already familiar with the basic concept of a “field” and you know that fields are the objects that hold...