OpenSceneGraph 3.0 beginner's guide: create high-performance virtual reality applications with OpenSceneGraph, one of the best 3D graphics engines

412 Pages·2010·5.492 MB·English

by  Wang, Rui;Qian, Xuelei

OpenSceneGraph 3.0
Beginner's Guide
Create high-performance virtual reality applications with
OpenSceneGraph, one of the best 3D graphics engines

Rui Wang
Xuelei Qian

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
OpenSceneGraph 3.0
Beginner's Guide
Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing
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First published: December 2010
Production Reference: 1081210
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-849512-82-4
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Ed Maclean ([email protected])
Credits
Authors Editorial Team Leader
Rui Wang Akshara Aware
Xuelei Qian
Project Team Leader
Lata Basantani
Reviewers
Jean-Sébastien Guay
Project Coordinator
Cedric Pinson
Leena Purkait
Acquisition Editor
Proofreader
Usha Iyer
Dirk Manuel
Development Editor
Graphics
Maitreya Bhakal
Nilesh Mohite
Technical Editors
Production Coordinator
Conrad Sardinha
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
Vanjeet D'souza
Cover Work
Indexers Adline Swetha Jesuthas
Tejal Daruwale
Hemangini Bari
Monica Ajmera Mehta
Foreword
Scene graphs have been the foundation of real-time graphics applications for the last
two decades, whether it is a 3D game on a phone or a professional flight simulator
costing millions of pounds, a virtual reality application through to the latest 3D real-time
visualization on television, scene graphs are there under the hood, quietly churning out high
quality visuals.
However, even powerful tools like scene graphs don't write world leading graphics
applications by themselves, they still need developers with the skill and knowledge to make
best use of them and the hardware that they run on. This expertise isn't something that you
can gain by reading a few pages on the web—graphics hardware and software continues
to evolve and you need to keep up with it... It's a journey of learning and exploration
undertaken throughout your career.
OpenSceneGraph itself is the world's leading scene graph API, and has been written by,
and to fulfil the needs of, professional graphics application developers. It is written to be
powerful and productive to use rather than cut down and easy to use. Your first encounter
with OpenSceneGraph may well be daunting; it's a professional grade scene graph containing
many hundreds of classes and modules. But with this sophistication comes the ability to
write very powerful graphics applications quickly so it's well worth the effort in learning how
to make best use of it.
The authors of this book are users and contributors to the OpenSceneGraph software and its
community. For me it's rewarding to see this open source project reach out across the world
and inspire people, such as Rui Wang and Xuelei Qian, not only to use and contribute to the
software, but also to write a book about it so that others can start their own journey into
real-time graphics.
With this book their aim has been to take you from your first steps through to being able
to use advanced features of the OpenSceneGraph and the graphics hardware that it runs
on. Learning new concepts and APIs can often be dry and awkward, but once you get your
first applications on screen you'll glimpse the potential, and it won't be long before you are
seeing complex worlds come life. As a real-time graphics geek myself, I can't think anything
more rewarding than immersing yourself in 3D worlds that you help create. Some familiarity
with linear algebra, such like 3D vectors, quaternion numbers and matrix transformations, is
helpful, too.
Robert Osfield.
OpenSceneGraph Project Lead
About the Authors
Rui Wang is a software engineer at the Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping and the
manager of osgChina, the largest OSG discussion website in China. He is one of the most active
members of the official OSG community, who contributes to the serialization I/O, GPU-based
particle functionalities, BVH and animated GIF plugins, and other fixes and improvements to
the OSG project. He translated Paul Martz's OpenSceneGraph Quick Start Guide into Chinese in
2008, and wrote his own Chinese book OpenSceneGraph Design and Implementation in 2009,
cooperating with Xuelei Qian. He is also a novel writer and a guitar lover.
Xuelei Qian received his B.Sc. degree in Precision Instrument Engineering from Southeast
University, Jiangsu, China, and his Ph.D. degree in applied graphic computing from the
University of Derby, Derby, UK in 1998 and 2005, respectively. Upon completion of his Ph.D.
degree, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Dept. of Precision Instrument
and Mechanology at Tsinghua University and his current research interests include
E-manufacturing, STEP-NC and intelligent CNC, and virtual reality engineering.
Acknowledgement
We'd like to first thank Don Burns and Robert Osfield for their creative efforts in giving birth
to OpenSceneGraph, as well as thousands of members in the OSG core community, for their
supports and contributions all the time.
Thanks again to Robert Osfield, a pure open source enthusiast and father of a happy family,
for his tremendous passion in leading the development the OSG project for so many years
(since 1999). He also took time out of his busy schedule to write the foreword for this book.
We must express our deep gratitude to Rakesh Shejwal, Usha Iyer, Leena Purkait, Priya
Mukherji, and the entire Packt Publishing team for their talented work in producing yet
another product, as well as Jean-Sébastien Guay and Cedric Pinson for reviewing the first
drafts of the book and providing insightful feedback.
We would like to acknowledge John F. Richardson and Marek Teichmann, who announced
the book at the OpenSceneGraph BOF at SIGGRAPH 2010. We also offer special thanks to
Zhanying Wei, Xuexia Chen, Shixing Yang, Peng Xiao, Qingliang Liu, Su Jiang, and a number of
other people who contributed to the completion of this book in different ways.
Finally, we owe the most sincere thanks to Paul Martz, who dedicates the first
non-commercial book to OSG beginners all over the world and provides great help in
supporting the publication of our past and current books.
About the Reviewers
Jean-Sébastien Guay is a software developer from Montréal, Quebec, Canada. After
completing a Bachelor's Degree in Software Development and Software Engineering at
UQAM, he began a Master's Degree in Computer Graphics at École Polytechnique, where
he chose to use OpenSceneGraph for his Master's project. Motivated by the open nature
of the project and wanting to contribute, he started learning its inner workings, fixing bugs,
improving the Windows build system, and helping others with their problems on the osg-
users mailing list. He has been in the top three posters each month ever since. But is that a
good thing or just an indication that he talks too much?
Since late 2007, he has worked for CM-Labs Simulations Inc. (http://www.vortexsim.
com/), where he develops the Vortex physics toolkit and training simulators for various
industries such as construction, subsea, and others. Being the company's dedicated graphics
developer allows him to continue using and contributing to OpenSceneGraph. The best part
is he gets paid for it, too! Doing so has helped improve his proficiency with C++ as well as
allowed him to use other scene graphs such as Vega Prime and OpenSG, which lets him keep
an open mind and always see the big picture.
Jean-Sébastien has participated in several OpenSceneGraph user meetings, and he was
a presenter at the OpenSceneGraph BOFs at Siggraph in 2008 and 2009. He is also
a co-developer of the osgOcean nodekit, an ocean surface rendering add-on library for
OpenSceneGraph, which is available at http://osgocean.googlecode.com/. He has
also contributed to other open source projects, such as Bugzilla, Yafaray, and others.
Jean-Sébastien currently lives in the suburbs of Montréal, with his lovely wife and their three
young boys. His personal website can be found at http://whitestar02.webhop.org/.
Cedric M. Pinson has twelve years of experience in 3D software. He has worked in
the video game industry at Nemosoft and Mekensleep, before joining OutFlop, where
he has served as the project leader for 3D client technology. He is a contributor to the
OpenSceneGraph project and the author and maintainer of osgAnimation. He now does
freelance work around OpenGL technologies such as OpenSceneGraph and WebGL.
I would like to thank my friends, Loic Dachary for helping me with
his advice, Jeremy Moles for the motivation and comments about
OpenSceneGraph, Johan Euphrosine for his support, Olivier Lejade who
offered me a place to work, and Amy Jones who helps in many ways.