Slashdot Mirror
SGI Releases Open Inventor As Open Source
SGI has released Open Inventor (TM) 3D graphics toolkit to the open source community. You can read the press release here and their FAQ here. I'm sure many people will ask what is this Open Inventor, so could a /. reader give a few words about it?
I use Blender at home (because I only mess with this stuff for my own amusement). So as soon as I read this I thought "Can Blender and Inventor share tech, now that they are both open"? The only thing that would keep that from happening is license problems.
But Inventor is LGPL! Woohoo! http://oss.sgi.com/projects/inven tor/license.html
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
from the FAQ :
What is Open Inventor?
Open Inventor is an object-oriented 3D toolkit offering a comprehensive solution to interactive graphics programming problems. It presents a programming model based on a 3D scene database that dramatically simplifies graphics programming. It includes a rich set of objects such as cubes, polygons, text, materials, cameras, lights, trackballs, handle boxes, 3D viewers, and editors that speed up your programming time and extend your 3D programming capabilities.
so, basically it's a set of OpenGL models and widgets,.. i haven't gotten to look at it in depth but if i had to guess i'd say it could be quite handy. i have yet to see it implimented in anything, though.
someone go out and make a 3d tetris with it
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
What is Open Inventor?
Open Inventor is an object-oriented 3D toolkit
offering a comprehensive solution to
interactive graphics programming problems. It
presents a programming model based on a 3D
scene database that dramatically
simplifies graphics programming. It includes
a rich set of objects such as cubes,
polygons, text, materials, cameras,
lights, trackballs, handle boxes, 3D viewers,
and editors that speed up your programming time
and extend your 3D programming capabilities.
Open Inventor:
is built on top of OpenGL
defines a standard file format for 3D data
interchange
introduces a simple event model for 3D
nteraction
provides animation objects called Engines
provides high performance object picking
is window system and platform independent
is a cross-platform 3D graphics development system
supports PostScript printing
encourages programmers to create new customized objects
is fun to use
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
OpenInventor is a superset of OpenGL, easier to use but I'd say less performant.
But it's really easy to use which make it really fun.
---
Guillaume
give me all your garmonbozia
Humm, I think there is a company (from Norway, IIRC) who did an open source implementation of OpenInventor.
Does anybody happen to know something more? (how does the two compare?)
Real life is overrated.
Open Inventors main draw (no pun intended) is its scene graph. Basically, a scene graph is a description of everything in a 3D world. You can use it to render a scene, but its not limited to that. You could visit every node in a scene graph and instead of rendering, you could build a new data structure based on the previous one which does anything you want with the geometry. Which for me means building a display list that will draw the scene using advanced texturing and shading techniques which are not available in Open Inventor. This means that I get to concentrate on the shading, and do not have to worry about how to store my geometry. Open Inventor has a file format as well, so I don't even have to worry about creating a new one.
I mainly see Open Inventor as a prototyping tool, because its possible to get something on the screen with very little code. I also see it as an API to use to create editors and other tools. But, does anyone know any "real" applications that use Open Inventor?
IRIS Explorer and a whole load of other (particularly scientific) visualisation apps are based on Inventor. Also check out most stuff by TGS like 3SpaceAssistant, and Amari 3D. I coded a load of stuff using the Inventor API last year on Windows and it really is very good - not just for prototyping but for full blown applications.
Open Inventor is great at rapidly creating interactive 3D applications. By 'interactive' I mean things where the user can get in and pick objects, move them around, etc. Open Inventor takes care of all the rendering and events for you and so it's pretty easy to get something up and running. Performance is good but not Inventor's main thrust -- so it'd be better to write something like a model or level editor in inventor than a first-person shooter.
I've seen Inventor used to create an architectural modeler with great effect; the author was really able to focus on the interface and not spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel for his underlying data structure. We considered using Inventor for the project that eventually became my children's 3D building blocks program, but there were licensing issues and we didn't think the performance would be there by the time we wanted to release it. If I were starting again today, I might reconsider.
GollyGee Blocks -- 3D creativity software for kids.
VRML died because in order to be interesting, the descriptor files were HUGE (I had a playfile that comtained a the ground, a floor, kneeler wall, columns, and a flat roof to a free-standing pagoda-type thing with a few scene lights so you could see it....very basic, no detail, and the file was something like 200K. And lets not forget how long it tool my P166 to render the scene...
VRML came ont he scene too soon...before high bandwidth, before everyone had a fast computer, before it was practical to use...that's why you don't see it any more...though I still play with is sometimes...
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
In my biz (mining visualisation; you know mining as in rocks, not data :-) OpenInventor is fairly heavily used. Granted, OpenGLOptimizer is being moved to for performance reasons, but OpenInventor is still quite prevalent.
Basically, there are lots of scientific visualisation apps out there that this LGPLed release will help. As it stands, we are now only about 1 library away (ViewKit if it matters) from having the possibility to release our apps as Open Source. (No promises, as we still must convince the powers-that-be in our organisation...)
As always, I speak for myself, not my employer, yadda, yadda, yadda...
Woo hoo!
Always wanted some of that spiffy SGI stuff, just couldn't afford it. Now I'll be able to and hack in the features *I* want. =)
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There's been an effort to create an open inventor clone, called coin3d. Think along the lines of Mesa - same api, but unofficial. But what happens to them now? Or perhaps more importantly, what happens to the programming contest the parent company is sponsering to get people to use the toolkit? I want prizes, damnit!
See you, space cowboy...
Dammit, it's got NOTHING to do with Linux. The software is now Free, which means you can build, use, and modify it on any of a wide array of systems. It's about having the source, not about Open Inventor for Linux. There's been OI for Linux/x86 for years already. I can't believe how narrow your view is.
From the FAQ: Open Inventor: * is built on top of OpenGL ...
* is fun to use
Anyone else find that last one humorous? :)
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
Inventor is a good scene graph, albeit overly complicated. The problem is that its scene graph file format is not trivially (left-right) parsable.
When the early VRML specification was derived from Inventor, (the spec writers used several other open source specs including one I contributed to), they based the file format on Inventor. This was good for them, as they worked at SGI and had access to the parser source.
However, nobody ELSE had access to the parser source, and the complexity of its recreation, along with critical ambiguities in the original spec, made recreation a many man month ordeal. Until recently, those parties that did go through this ordeal chose to sell their implementations under somewhat expensive commercial licenses.
This is why so many applications could export VRML, but few could read it back in. This led to the spec remaining in the hands of a few commercial entities, where it has remained despite claiming an "open" consortium (that you must purchase a seat on.)
The new X3D spec is an interesting mapping of older VRML onto XML, but instead of simplifying things they chose (surprise) to map directly, retaining much of the original problem.
Inventors source release probably has more to do with Fahrenheight(sp).
Wake up and smell the sTuDlYcApS d00d. oss.sgi.com is an SGI 1000 series server. It has 2 700 MHz Intel weaklings. And yeah, it's running Linux. Maybe the download limit is there to keep ignorant fools from getting at it. Especially since you can get it by CVS too. oss.sgi.com is a lot more than just an FTP server; placing a limit on FTP connections is a sensible thing to do. Get a clue, man.
Should have used preview I guess...
:)
Sorry for the poor formatting.
Open Inventor:
* is built on top of OpenGL
...
* is fun to use
Anyone else find that last one humorous?
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
Dear slashdot, Why do we have to do your job for you? Just post a link to the Open Inventor FAQ rather than getting every /. user and his dog to rehash the damn thing here.
Don't you people get paid for this?
GoRK
Open Inventor is THE toolkit for writing 3D scenes that use the OpenGL libraries. Now that we have the Mesa libraries and Open Inventor is open sourced the world is definitely your lobster as far as desiging fantastic 3D application. Watch out for tons of great 3D applications that will appear now.
Open Inventor, as the FAQs will tell you, is a 3d format designed to work with OpenGL.
Mark Pesce used Inventor as a starting point for VRML-1 around 1995. VRML-1 was the first real attempt to create a standard 3d file format that would work over the web. It has seen limited success as a standard of exchange betweed CAD programs.
A second version of VRML based loosely on VRML-1 (but not backward compatable with it) was proposed by one of the major industry players and rapidly became an ISO standard in 1997. By many arguments, it failed as a standard because the required plugin is not installed by default. There are other reasons too, but by and large, mention of VRML still gets a "huh?" even from some fairly computer savvy people.
The next version of VRML being developed by the Web3D Consortium is based on XML. The tags are designed such that conversion from VRML97 to X3D is quite straightforward. If X3D is built into IE and Mozilla, we could finally see the standard VR format gaining acceptance.
As for all the Open Source software flying around in the 3d community now, it tends to make things less exciting from a money point of view. OTOH, I'm sure the same web designers who like to make bandwidth hogging flash sites are getting very excited now.
I am obviously biased in certain areas. Other, less biased histories can be found at: http://hiwaay.net/~crispen/vrml/history.html
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm looking for cost-free stuff that isn't cripware to get started. I have a very strong math/physics background, so I have no problem describing equations of motion, but I haven't the faintest as to how to get started.
Also, how prohibitive is the hardware for this kind of thing?
Hooray, someone else gets it. 10 years from now when everyone's using something new, you'll hear whining "Why can't they port it from Linux to FooOS? I don't care if only 8% of the market uses it, I want it!" On the other hand, with a source release, you'll have most of the work of a port done (assuming the product and FooOS follow standards) before FooOS is even released.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
I think the format is quite simple and sensible. Of course, I may be biased from having used it for so many years.
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Keep an eye on the older stuff page - the stuff that doesn't make it to the front page sometimes has no comments for several seconds!
PigPog.
"The world is your oyster"
not, lobster ^_^. I am having trouble figuring out what "the world is your lobster" would actually mean if it was correct.
There's also a free work-alike called apprentice. Last time I checked on it it was missing many of the animation and interaction classes which open inventor provides, but it was able to load some inventor scene graphs from files. More info on apprentice is at this site .
In college, I took a couple of animation courses, taught in Open Inventor. Basically, it's a handy dandy interface into OpenGL. We didn't get down and dirty with it, as it was only beginning courses (We used the OI primitives and the like). The big thing it adds (That's easier to understand than OpenGL's standard) is an object graph.
Assume you have an arm attached to a body. You want to reach the arm out. You could rotate the shoulder, and the rest of the arm would rotate, as it would be down the object graph from the shoulder. You could add a second rotation onto the elbow, and then on down to the hand etc. Yes, you can do this with OpenGL, but the way OI does it is a bit easier to understand.
Plus, you had a "preview" program (Can't remember what it's called) where you can basically build your models out of OI widgits, and then get the text, so you know what the coordinates of everything are, etc. One of the handiest things in the world, IMO.
I have been wanting this for so long. I met the OpenInventor team about 5 years ago - smart cookies. I've been begging SGI for exactly this every year for the past 4 years.
They did an incredible job - it's one of the best designed C++ libraries I've ever used. It's not suitable for games but for putting good 3d interactive graphics in a professional program without spending *years* learning the details of OpenGL it is wonderful.
This is the one move that SGI could have made to prevent Direct3D winning the 3D api wars. Scenegraph based applications are an order of magnitude easier to program.
Thanks SGI - I might even buy another SGI now (I know SGIs came with OpenInventor - but it wouldn't work gcc before)
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Yes. Everyone was too busy typing up 20-line descriptions of what it is that they didn't have time to go for the first post.
('bout time we actually had an article the motivated people to type more than 'FP' as soon as they see it)
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Slightly OT, but we have all been talking about how the nVidia cards have the best consumer OpenGL ICD and that they will not release it to help Matrox and ATI etc. catch up........what chance of SGI (who MUST have the best OpenGL ICDs period) helping everyone play catchup instead.....then we can all have some Schweeeeeeeeeeet Free ICDs.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Hmm. I too thought that all of blender was open source for version 2.x, but in fact only some parts of it are. Damn. Have a look at the open source section at blender's website.
You guys don't get it. There is currently a battle for a general-purpose cross-platform open-source scene-graph(hey, hyphen city) and SGI just threw their hat into the ring, and a big sombrero it is. To get a feel for how many toolkits are out there, check out the Linux3D BOF notes from SIGGRAPH. http://www.linux3d.org (and that barely touches all of the offerings, not even considering the gaming scene-graphs, which are a slightly different focus) SGI's OpenInventor represents some serious man-years of design and development, and many commercial applications on the IRIX platform have been built on top of it. In fact, TGS licensed Inventor from SGI a few years back, and have gone cross-platform and extended it's functionality. They charge something like 8 grand a developer seat! Does this release hurt them? Maybe. It's just like any other open-source effort, commercial versions need to provide value-add over the free implementation to justify their cost. Right now, TGS is cross-platform, more loaders, large-model handling, volume rendering, commercially supported, etc. HP was rumoured to be releasing DirectModel, their large-model scengraph, it is in beta for Linux, but has yet to be release. HP has really been dropping the ball on that one, they even forgot to mention it at Linux3D BOF at SIGGRAPH. Sun has Java3D, which has a performance problem, and relies on good JavaVM on each machine. Windows has opted out, Farhenheit is dead, leaving Direct3D Retained Mode. So, yeah, this represents a significant blip on the open source radar, at least as it concerns 3D graphics. If there is enough involvment, and enough features are added, it has a chance at becoming the defacto standard, much like Mesa3D has. IMHO, it needs work in these 2 areas: - Performance Inventor has a rep for being slow or hard to speed up, due to it's scene-graph design. With todays 3D hardware increase, it may not be as significant. Thread-safety is another important issue these days. - Cross-platform SGI may not want this, but they need to realize that if any 3D scenegraph is going to emerge as a leader, it must be cross-platform. A lot of companies need to run on as many platforms as possible, if they want to get the most dollars they can. - New features Volume rendering, large models, decimation, loaders, etc. All are good things. But in summary, OpenInventor has as its strength a well-designed, mature, well-documented API that could really make a difference to the 3D community now that it is open sourced. Kudo's to SGI for finally making the decision. They're contribution will help set the bar for a minimum quality that the other efforts will have to compare too. Smart business move, too, imho, because people may start with Inventor, and finally demand more performance, which will lead them to Performer or SGI's hardware. It's SGI's job to make that value-add significant enough.
Careful. I could put IRIX 5.3 on an Indigo and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't handle it. If you mean an origin (which would most likely run irix given that linux on such systems is quite experimental yet) instead of the crap sgi is trying to pass off as "servers" these days (x86, what a sick joke), then yes, absolutely you are right. But simply running irix does not a server make.
This is slightly offtopic, but important none-the-less.
As most of you know, the GeForce2 Ultra Windows drivers took a jump to version 6 (detonator 3.) However, it seems that most of the performance improvements in Detonator 3 are already in the Linux OpenGL driver. That's a bad thing. Since it seems that the Detonator 3 drivers improve performance by 20% or so on average, it means that the benchmarks where Linux was running neck-and-neck with Windows were inaccurate. If benchmarking is done between equal platforms, Detonator3 and Linux OpenGL, it might show that Linux was still 20% or more behind the performance of the Windows drivers. Is anybody aware of such a test? Also can anybody back up the fact that the Linux OGL driver contain the tweeks in Detonator 3. My source was some guy on Slashdot, be he seemed to know what he was talking about.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Just thought someone should point out that in the Java word we have Java3D, a very very nice scene graph system, that's now in Version 2 with added features. (I wouldn't be suprised if I fodun otu the the J3D guys were inspired by some of inventor's ideas, seeing how long ivnetor has been around.)
J3D is portable across udnerlying 3D libraries. Currently there are version for both OpenGL and Direct3D.
On the down side, it tried to be all things to all people so it was (at the 1.0 level anyway) very large. It had a huge number of methods and a gigantic symbol table (link times were a little slow.) Also, because it implemented a scene graph to enable fast drawing and abstracting the data rep away from you, it often meant that you ended up with 2 copies of our scene data unless you built the app to use Inventor specifically from the begining. i.e. I was asked to attach an Inventor viewer to an existing app. I would have to take the data structures from that app and pass them into Inventor's Scene Graph via the Inventor api, where this data was duplicated in Inventor's internal data structures. Even freeing the external apps data rep meant that the memory was still around, just ready to be used for the next malloc, which either lead to fragmentation of high memory use.
All of these observations are based off of 1.0, not sure what it looks like now. I'd use it again, but if I were building an app aroudnd it, I'd make sure that I designed the data structures to mesh with Inventor well.
Does anyone know how closely tied it is to Motif? Is it the whole thing, or just a small part? How hard would it be to use it in, say, a GTK+ program without dragging Motif (or even Lesstif) along with it?
(I would download it myself and take a look, but their server seems to be /.'ed.)
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
Synopsis
Ultimately, Open Inventor is useful as a 3D prototyping tool. It's a great way to get a simple, interactive 3D program running quickly.
Beyond that, I don't think that it's particularly useful. It falls into the classic trap of 'jack of all trades, master of none'. There is nothing that it does particlarly well except prototyping; so there are no rich Inventor applications.
My experience with Inventor
When I started at Silicon Graphics working on Inventor, (or Scenario as it was called at the time) I was filled with optimism and excitement. This tool was going to make 3D ubiquitous. I had thought that the reason that there were so few 3D applications was that they were too hard to write; and that by building a generic high-level toolkit we could solve that problem.
The big problem ended up being that by building a high-level toolkit; you end up taking over the application. If you want to provide high-level functionality, you necessarily have to circumscribe the possible applications. You have to adopt the Inventor scene graph, nodes, and traversal. These may not be appropriate for your particular application, in fact, they are almost guaranteed not to be. You can extend Inventor by creating your own nodes, and several users have done that to get more performance; and a closer match between their application and the Inventor infrastructure -- but that's only a step along the way to creating your complete independent application IMHO.
There were great things about the Inventor development experience. I have never worked with as bright or dedicated a team of programmers as Carey, Strauss, Paul Isaacs, Nik Thompson, Dave Mott, Dave Immel, Josie Wernecke, and Alain Dumesney. I was in charge of backups, and it was not uncommon that almost every of the hundreds of source modules was changed in a day -- we were making large scale changes at an incredibly rapid pace as we prototyped, learned, and experimented. ILM was one of our beta-sites, and they got more out of Inventor than I ever thought that they would.
Inventor also cured me of C++. It seemed at first that C++ would be perfect for something like Inventor; but it was a near disaster IMHO (not shared by everyone on the team, I should point out.) C++ gives you some extra rope; but it quickly becomes tangled around your neck.
The biggest problem by far was nodes and traversals. You can think about them as two different dimensions. Nodes are things like cubes, cylinders, materials, colors, lights, and so on; while traversals are for rendering, bounding box calculation, printing, and the like. Nodes are the nouns, and traversals are the verbs.
C++ works for one-dimensional extensions, but we had to resort to a traditional function table to do this two-dimensional extension. It works, but it's a mess; and the language only got in the way instead of helping. This is only one of the many examples were the promise of C++ was not only not fulfilled, but was shown to be the exact opposite of what was promised; it hindered rather than helped.
Going forward
At Siggraph this year, there were no less than four scene graphs for Linux discussed during the Linux/OpenGL BOF meeting. I wish them luck, and hope that they find something useful in the Inventor source.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
http://vismod.www.media.mit.edu/people/kbrussel/Iv y/
With Ivy, you can mess witb OpenInventor interactively, from the scheme prompt. Can't beat it!
The best thing about VRML is that anybody can make a VRML model. It's plain text (utf8) and marvelous worlds have been built using nothing more than vi or notepad. The worst thing about VRML is that anybody can make a VRML model.
A 200K file for a little bitty building is obscene. You absolutely did not do this by hand. You got it from a modeler that exported VRML, and you figured, "hell, it parses, let's put it on the Web".
I'm not singling you out. Far from it. The thing that was the absolute worst PR for VRML was that easily half the VRML worlds out there were bloated pigs just like your world. That's because hardly anybody valued small, fast worlds, and even fewer knew how to build them. For instance, I've got three VRML decimators (one uses Garland & Heckbert, one uses Hoppe, and I don't know what the third one uses), and I wouldn't dream of publishing a VRML model on the web without sending it through at least one of the decimators.
And don't get me started on color and lighting. Jesus H. Christ, you can do beautiful things with lighting in VRML. You don't have photon tracing (which means the scene will render in your lifetime) but you've got enough effects to make something really beautiful. Not one world in a twenty uses anything but the headlight and primary colors. That alone is responsible for VRML's rep as "cartoonish".
There are many better examples than this one of what you can do with color and lighting when you take a little time, but I might as well toot my own horn.
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
The VRMLworks
...and Open Inventor has been available for Win32 platforms for years through TGS - and it integrates superbly with Visual C++ 6.0. From nothing to a working Inventor app in 30 minutes with this, that can open, save, print, etc...
I have a slightly different perspective on this. IMO, the main reason that VRML died was because the tools were pretty much Windows and IRIX only, at a time when most 'net content was created by Mac designers working with Unix (but not necessarily IRIX) people.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Only the runtime for Open Inventor was supplied with IRIX. The developer kit was always available for an extra charge (until now I guess).
Anyway this is very exciting news!
"Yeah well
To really udnerstand the results you need to read Chris Rijk's article. There really isn't a lot of fluff there, it's all pretty much to the point. You can't understand an issue as complex as comparative peformance charcteristics from "soundbites" or annecdotes.
BUT if you want a soundbite, the soundbite is this...
There is no magic here. Java compiles to native code just as C or C++ does. At run-time however (when Java compiles) there is optimization information on what your program actually does that is not available at "build-time" when C++ compiles which thsu results in ebtter optimisation of the code.
Additionally Hotspot does "risky optimizations" because it can back them out if the guesses prove wrong. This is something a build-time compiler cannot do.
Finally, you can amke any code slow but ineffective/inappropriate programming. Most Java prgorammers are still very new to the language and how it works. It hasn't been around long enough for a body of practices to build up yet.
In that regard, I find this whole "java is slow" thing frankly ratehr amusing. If yo uwant to take a time-trip back 5 years, take any senatce with the words "java is slow" in it, and repalce the word "java" with the word C++
Take this from someone who was part of a LONG project to get Java 3D working up to the level a naive person would expect after hearing the Java hype... it ain't happing.
The performance of Java 3D is abysmal. Sure, you can build a few 3D molecules, but try mapping video onto it in real-time. Uh-uh; no way. Try powering it with a big graph, oh, say 30 objects or so (*nothing* in OpenGL)... forget it. Open Inventor is not the fastest engine on the planet (not supposed to be), but it's WAY faster than Java3D.
I still hold out hope for Java. It's got a future as a replacement for CGI, or database clients, but don't even think of using it where you need performance and access to system level hardware acceleration.
Peace.
Scott
Right on. If only it were real SGI's running IRIX, then all of the people could download it... Even though they don't even know what the fuck it is. Now where's the free IRIX version? :)
sucks. a language for trendy linux fucks. use perl or something, dammit.
that sucks. if i was them i'd use something that is actually stable...maybe irix.
Just couldn't resist. :) And yes, I've worked with OIV on that platform. There's nothing you could offer me that would get me to use a microsoft product ever again. *shudder* Just thinking about that experience is disturbing.
I couldn't find anything that specifically said Linux, but that's how the /. article is written, and that seems to be the gist of the conversation so far. (Although I'm guessing that's probably the "other" slashdot effect, Linuxcentricity)...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
>> But, does anyone know any "real" applications that use Open Inventor? Sure, Open Inventor just might be the most widely used scene graph API. Particularly in scientific visualization (Iris Explorer, Amira, etc), chemistry/biology and geoscience (Landmark, Schlumberger, Paradigm Geophysical, Magic Earth, etc).
Open Inventor is to OpenGL, as QuickDraw 3D is to RAVE.
Good news!