Book Image

OpenSceneGraph 3.0: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

OpenSceneGraph 3.0: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Virtual reality has quite a lot of demand in computer science today and OpenSceneGraph, being one of the best 3D graphics toolkits, is being used widely. Although you can use the powerful OpenSceneGraph, based on the low-level OpenGL API, to implement virtual-reality applications that simulate different environments in the 3D world, developing picture-perfect applications is easier said than done.This book has been written with the goal of helping readers become familiar with the structure and main functionalities of OpenSceneGraph (OSG), and guide them to develop virtual-reality applications using this powerful 3D graphics engine. This book covers the essence of OpenSceneGraph (OSG), providing programmers with detailed explanations and examples of scene graph APIs.This book helps you take full advantages of the key features and functionalities of OpenSceneGraph (OSG). You will learn almost all of the core elements required in a virtual reality application, including memory management, geometry creation, the structure of the scene graph, realistic rendering effects, scene navigation, animation, interaction with input devices and external user interfaces, file reading and writing, and so on. With the essential knowledge contained in this book, you will be able to start using OSG in your own projects and research fields, and extend its functionalities by referring to OSG's source code, official examples and API documentation. This handy book divides the core functionalities of the proved and comprehensive OpenSceneGraph (OSG) 3D graphics engine into different aspects, which are introduced in separate chapters. Each chapter can be treated as an individual part that covers one important field of OSG programming, along with several examples illustrating concrete usages and solutions. But the sequence of chapters is also organized from the easy to the more difficult, to help you get to grips with OSG.By the end of the whole book, you will have gained a ready-to-use OSG development environment for yourself and have the general ability to develop OSG-based applications and extend practical functionalities for your own purposes.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
OpenSceneGraph 3.0
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Scene graphs


A scene graph is a general data structure that defines the spatial and logical relationship of a graphical scene for efficient management and rendering of graphics data. It is typically represented as a hierarchical graph, which contains a collection of graphics nodes including a top-level root node, a number of group nodes each of which can have any number of child nodes, and a set of leaf nodes each of which has zero child nodes and that serve together as the bottom layer of the tree. A typical scene graph does not allow a directed cycle (where some nodes are connected in a closed chain) or an isolated element (a node that has no child or parent) inside of itself.

Each group node can have any number of children. Grouping these child nodes allows them to share the information of the parent and be treated as one unit. By default, an operation performed by a parent propagates its effects to all of its children.

It also happens that certain nodes have more than one parent node, in which case the node is considered to be "instanced", and the scene graph can be defined as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Instancing produces many interesting effects, including data sharing and multi-pass rendering.

The concept of scene graph has been widely applied in many modern software and applications, for instance, AutoCAD, Maya, CorelDraw, VRML, Open Inventor, and the one that we are going to investigate—OpenSceneGraph.