What This Book Contains

This book describes how to write applications using the Open Inventor toolkit. The Open Inventor Toolmaker, a companion book for the advanced programmer, describes how to create new Open Inventor classes and how to customize existing classes.

The Inventor Mentor - Volume I contains the following sets of chapters:

Getting Started:

• Overview provides a general description of Open Inventor concepts and classes and how Inventor relates to OpenGL and the X Window System.
• An Open Inventor Sampler presents a short program that creates a simple object. This program is then modified to show the use of important Inventor objects: engines, manipulators, and components. Building a Scene Graph:
• Nodes and Groups introduces the concept of a scene graph and shows how to create nodes and combine them into different kinds of groups.
• Cameras and Lights describes the camera nodes used to view a scene and the light nodes that provide illumination.
• Shapes, Properties, and Binding describes how to create both simple and complex shapes and how to use property nodes, including material, draw style, and lighting model nodes. Binding materials and surface normals to shape nodes is also explained. More About Nodes:
• Text shows the use of 2D and 3D text nodes.
• Textures describes how to apply textures to the surfaces of objects in a scene. Using a Scene Graph:
• Applying Actions describes how operations are applied to an Inventor scene graph. Actions include OpenGL rendering, picking, calculating a bounding box, calculating a transformation matrix, writing to a file, and searching the scene graph for certain types of nodes.
• Rendering Features describes some rendering techniques such as transparency, antialiasing, shadowing or bump mapping.
• Handling Events and Selection explains how Inventor receives events from the window system. It also describes how the selection node manages a selection list and performs highlighting.
• Touch and Gesture Events explains how Inventor receives and translate touch events from the window system. It also describes how touch events are managed and processed.
• Importing data describes Open Inventor's interchange file format, used for reading files into Inventor, writing files out from Inventor, and data exchanges such as copy and paste.
• Exporting Data describes how to write data as an image, as a video, as a scene graph or as HTML. Applications Tools:
• Sensors describes how Inventor sensors watch for certain types of events and invoke user-supplied callback functions when these events occur.
• Node Kits introduces node kits, a convenient mechanism for creating groups of related Inventor nodes. Each node kit contains a catalog of nodes from which you select the desired nodes.
• Draggers and Manipulators describes how to use draggers and manipulators, which are special objects in the scene graph that respond to user events. Manipulators are nodes with field values that can be edited directly by the user. Using the Toolkit with Other Libraries:
• Open Inventor Component Library shows how to use Inventor's Xt components, which are program modules with a built-in user interface for changing the scene graph interactively. Miscellaneous:
• Stereo Viewing describes how stereo viewing in Open Inventor works
• Curves and Surfaces explains how to use NURBS curves and surfaces.
• Shaders explains the shading language concept and the Open Inventor implementation.
• Collision Detection describes how to prevent the camera or an object from colliding with objects.
• Multithreading discusses how Open Inventor deals with multithreading.
• Open Inventor Computing framework explains how Open Inventor allows computing.
• Remote Rendering explains how to run an Open Inventor application remotely.
• Immersive Virtual Reality describes how Open Inventor deals with immersive environments.
• Engines describes how you can use Inventor engines to animate parts of a scene graph, or to create interdependencies among the nodes in the graph.
• Using Open Inventor with OpenGL discusses how to use Open Inventor with the OpenGL Library.
• Portable User Interface - DialogViz describes how to build a portable user interface and how to incorporate it into a 3D scene.
• Optimizing Applications explains how to increase the performance of your Open Inventor application. There is one appendix:
• Appendix A. Error Handling describes Inventor's error handling mechanism.