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

Configuring third-party dependencies


Have you ever built OSG from source code with your native compiler and the CMake system introduced in Chapter 2, Compilation and Installation of OpenSceneGraph? Then you may find that there are lots of mis-compiled components in the self-made OSG libraries, when compared with the installer provided in the same chapter. For example:

# osgviewer --image picture.jpg

The image picture.jpg may not be displayed even though it exists in the proper search path. If you encounter this situation, look into the plugin directory, and you may find that the osgdb_jpg or osgdb_jpeg library is missed. That is simply because we din't configure the options for an important third-party library, libjpeg, which is required by the JPEG reader-writer.

OSG doesn't load most file formats by itself, but delegates the loading of the data to third-party dependencies. Especially when handling various kinds of model, image, and miscellaneous files, a huge number of excellently-written...