When a user clicks a mouse button on a handle-box manipulator and drags the object to a new location on the screen, how does Inventor receive the user input from the mouse and translate the object accordingly? What happens if the user clicks the mouse on a space in the rendered image that doesn't contain any objects? How does Inventor keep track of several user-selected objects? These are all questions that need to be answered before you can write interactive Inventor applications.

This chapter begins by providing a brief description of how window-specific events are translated into Inventor events. It introduces you to the different kinds of Inventor events and the methods associated with them. You will learn how the scene manager finds the event handler for a specific event and how different nodes handle events.