Open Inventor

3D Modelling and Graphics Library

For scientific 3D representation and data modeling, Open Inventor has emerged as a defacto standard in the scientific, engineering, geological exploration, and academic communities. It also forms the basis for higher-level commercial graphics applications, such as TGS' Amira and CAD applications.

Developed by SGI, Open Inventor overlays OpenGL with an object oriented structure. A scene is represented in a scenegraph, a tree structure consisting of graphical objects and attributes that can be traversed by renderers, pick actions, and user actions.

Open Inventor also provides a number of extra features, such as animators that can be embedded within the scenegraph.

There are three flavors of Open Inventor:

  • An open-source version maintained under the auspices of SGI. This version is free, but has limitations and no support.
  • A commercial offering by Mercury/TGS that has been significantly enhanced with features like large-model data handling, volumetric analyses, multi-processor support, etc. TGS' OpenInventor provides Java and C#/.NET bindings.
  • A dual-licensed version called Coin, offered by Systems in Motion. It is comparable to the TGS product, but is free to use for non-commercial applications. COIN is also supported on Mac OS X.

Which One?

If your project is non-commercial or consists of relatively small objects without a lot of internal data and a minimal amount of textures, the open-source version from SGI may be adequate for you (note - you'll have to get or create a window binding for anything other than X-Windows.)

If, however, you're dealing with large data-sets or need advanced analysis/rendering capabilities, the Mercury/TGS or COIN version is the more appropriate choice.

Whichever you choose, you get object-oriented modeling overlayed on OpenGL, and that can take advantage of OpenGL hardware acceleration support (if present in the hardware.)

More Information

KIS Systems has extensive experience with OpenInventor under all platforms (except OS X.) Whether you're starting a new project or need to enhance legacy projects, we're the choice to get you're project moving.