Open Inventor offers a comprehensive object-oriented set of more than 1300 ready-to-use classes integrated in a user-friendly framework for rapid development. The scene graph paradigm provides ready-to use graphics programming patterns and the truly object-oriented design encourages extensibility and customization to satisfy specific requirements.
The IvTune graphical utility is the definitive tool for prototyping and tuning 3D applications. Pluggable in any Open Inventor application, IvTune presents synchronized views of the scene graph: a 3D View, a Tree View, a node overview window, a field editor and a field watch. This allows for fast tuning and debugging at run time, and ideally complements the numerous code examples provided with Open Inventor for quick learning.
Build upon Industry-standard OpenGL® rendering engine, Open Inventor by VSG has been tuned for improved performance by utilizing the latest relevant OpenGL features and extensions, automatically taking care of OpenGL optimization techniques to provide optimal performance and a much higher-level programming interface.
Open Inventor can create new geometry with fewer triangles and automatically generates LOD (level of detail) and Appearance Preserving Simplification nodes to enhance performance and enable rendering interactively. It also converts geometry into more efficient triangle strips and reorders objects to minimize state changes. Open Inventor also supports fast editing of very complex scenes.
In addition to its complete 3D geometry kernel, Open Inventor® by VSG provides robust support of advanced 3D features, such as NURBS surfaces and collision detection. Open Inventor by VSG delivers full support of NURBS curves and trimmed surfaces with unlimited order, and allows for fast, efficient and crack-free NURBS tessellation. It also provides a fast collision detection engine both between objects and between the camera and the scene, which prevents for example the camera from penetrating other objects in walkthrough type applications. This optimized collision detection engine has proven to be efficient even on very complex scenes.
Through its native advanced support of OpenGL® and ISO standard VRML97, Open Inventor-based applications are automatically compatible Furthermore, Open Inventor has been designed to natively support leading development environments, such as Microsoft MFC library and Trolltech Qt graphic application development framework, through dedicated sets of classes which provides for example easy and elegant ways to integrate Open Inventor graphic components such as viewers, editors Ö within Qt Designer.
The Open Inventor cross-platform framework allows developers to design scalable and interactive 3D applications across the whole range of UNIX, Linux and Microsoft Windows systems. Resulting applications can be 100% source code compatible and only a recompilation is necessary to make it run on other platforms.
Open Inventor® by VSG provides application developers with a unique solution that enables interoperability between advanced 3D visualization and powerful GPU-based computing capabilities to perform parallel computation on the fly on a workstation.