Book Image

OpenSceneGraph 3 Cookbook

By : Rui Wang, Xuelei Qian
Book Image

OpenSceneGraph 3 Cookbook

By: Rui Wang, Xuelei Qian

Overview of this book

<p>OpenSceneGraph is an open source 3D graphics application programming interface, used by application developers in fields such as visual simulation, computer games, virtual reality, scientific visualization, and modeling. Familiar with its concepts and APIs, and need to improve your knowledge? This book is here to help. With exactly 100 recipes, it will enrich your experience and take you to the next level.<br /><br /><em>OpenSceneGraph 3 Cookbook</em> will escort you into the world of real-time 3D development with OpenSceneGraph, the world famous 3D graphics engine. The book assumes that you are already familiar with some basic concepts, and provides 100 vivid recipes to demonstrate how to utilize the API flexibly and how to implement some practical aspects.<br /><br />The book is divided into 10 chapters, each of which focuses on one topic. Readers may start from any topic they are interested in.<br /><br />The book includes customizing OpenSceneGraph, designing scene graph, geometry, scene navigation, animations, effects using fixed pipeline and shaders, managing mass data, and miscellaneous discussions. Every recipe will prove to be useful in a practical way or in research.<br /><br /><em>OpenSceneGraph 3 Cookbook</em> gives you a wide insight about 3D programming using OpenSceneGraph, with a set of meaningful and interesting examples.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
OpenSceneGraph 3 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Introduction


It is always exciting to create and view a large area, for example, the earth, in our OSG-based applications. A detailed terrain which can be paged dynamically and rendered smoothly is necessary for geographic information system (GIS). And that is what we are going to discuss in this chapter.

Early OSG developers may have heard of a simple utility named osgdem in the core OSG releases at that time. It can build terrain data from original elevation and texture files and makes the results easy to merge into the scene graph. There is even a BlueMarbleViewer project showing how to build earth models with NASA's BlueMarble imagery using OpenSceneGraph 1.2 at http://www.andesengineering.com/BlueMarbleViewer/.

The osgdem utility has grown to a complete terrain generation tool set named VirtualPlanetBuilder, which is also managed by Robert Osfield, the OSG team leader. And there are some other very good terrain builders and renderers. We will introduce one of them in this chapter—the...