38. Scene Modeling Tools in Open Inventor
Half Day / Beginning
Open Inventor is a high-level, cross-platform, object-oriented, 3D interactive graphics and animation toolkit. This course covers the knowledge required to create and organize scenes and objects in Open Inventor, including scene graph organization, shapes, properties, groups, lights, cameras, textures, Windows interfacing, VRML, and release 2.1 extensions. Basic concepts are illustrated with demonstration programs that execute on one screen while attendees examine associated source code on another.
Who Should Attend
Application developers, including those who are creating 3D, interactive, animated applications for Windows and UNIX platforms; multimedia developers who wish to use the Inventor library to handle rendering, interaction, and animation; OpenGL jocks who want to step up to a higher level of object-oriented specification; and graphics tinkerers with Windows boxes who want to develop cool models and applications.
Organizer
Chris Buckalew
California Polytechnic State University
Lecturers
Lewis Hitchner
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
John Readey
Portable Graphics, Inc.
Schedule
8:30 am: Introduction and Overview - Buckalew
Course outline and schedule
Block diagram of architecture
Relationship with OpenGL and VRML
Capabilities
Rendering shapes including 3D text and NURBS
Sensors: data and timer sensors
Engines: field connections, animation engines, arithmetic engines
Manipulators and draggers
Event handling: automatic, event callbacks, manual, callback nodes
Nodekits
File format
Component library, UNIX and PC
Extensibility
9:00 am: Ease of programming - Buckalew
Hello cone demo (from Mentor, modified for Windows '95 interface)
Engine demo (from Mentor, modified for Windows '95 interface)
Manipulator demo (from Mentor, modified for Windows '95 interface)
Examiner-viewer demo (from Mentor, modified for Windows '95 interface)
9:20 am: Scene graph organization - Buckalew
Simple scene graph example (with demo showing a 3-cube desk)
Types of nodes: shape, property, group
Traversal of scene graph
Paths and instances (with demo showing a desk with four instances of one leg)
10:00 am: Break
10:15 am: Lights and Cameras - Buckalew
Cameras: perspective and orthographic (with demo showing camera attributes including viewAll(), position, orientation, pointAt(), near and far planes, aspect ratios)
Lights: directional, point, and spotlight (with demo showing examples ofeach)
10:30 am: Building objects - Hitchner
Indexed face set (with demo showing CRT-like object and indexed
materials, normals, and texture coordinates)
Triangle mesh (with demo)
NURBS curve and surface (with demo showing B-spline and Bezier curves, and another demo showing a Bezier surface)
Trimmed NURBS surface (with demo showing same Bezier surface with edge trimmed and with holes)
3-D text (with demo showing 3-D text and beveled 3-D text)
11:10 am: Textures - Hitchner
Default texture mappings (with demo showing how a checkerboard texture maps onto various types of objects)
Scanned and defined textures (with demo showing examples of each)
Modulate, decal, and blend textures (with three demos each showing an untextured cube, a checkerboard texture, and the resulting textured cube)
Texture transforms (with demo showing a scaled and rotated checkerboard texture applied to a cube)
11:30 am: Recent Open Inventor developments - Readey
VRML extensions (with demo)
2.1 extensions
Cross-platform porting information
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