Today's games very often present jaw-dropping, complex scenes, and levels composed out of hundreds of single objects. So managing these object compositions can become a very challenging task without the right data structure. This is why the principle of the scene graph has become a state of the art technique in video games and computer graphics in general. A scene graph is a hierarchical tree structure that holds information about the scene models' positions, rotations, and parent-child relationships for relative positioning—among many other things.

In this recipe we will take a look at Panda3D's scene graph interfaces and will learn how to place and rotate objects within the scene and how to build a hierarchy of models and actors to allow our scene objects to be placed relative to each other.