Customer Reviews

The Inventor Mentor: Programming Object-Oriented 3D Graphics with Open Inventor, Release 2

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This book gives a good overview of how to use Open Inventor to depict three-dimensional objects and scenes. To my knowledge, this is the only introductory book on Open Inventor. Since there are no tutorial books on Open Inventor, this is where many people start when they want to use the language.

This book describes the capabilities and features of Open Inventor and gives brief examples, often with code. By the end of the book, you have a good idea of what Open Inventor can do and what parts of the language you would use for each feature. Unfortunately, many of the descriptions leave much to be desired. The book does not go into detail on how to use any feature. Many descriptions are given a light, cursory treatment.

If your goal is to start programming in Open Inventor, you will find many omissions. You will need to compensate for this by writing test cases and experimental code. You will also need to purchase The Open Inventor C++ Reference Manual, which will fill in many of the gaps in this book.

If, however, your goal is to get an understanding of what Open Inventor is, this book is perfect.

I find that the general concepts presented in this book are still valid, even several years after its publication. Most of the commercial graphics software out there follows similar programming architectures and this book covers these fairly well.

However, you need to read the Open Inventor Toolmaker book to extend your Open Inventor Library distribution by adding more nodes/actions/engines, it also gives a much more in depth understanding. The real power of this library is that you can extend it fairly easily.

For the reference manual book for detailed specs about functions or callback methods, they are all available in the online manual pages now which are distributed freely by SGI since August of 2000.

I teach a five week course using this book. Students praise the material as being comprehensible, easy to understand, and creative. After each chapter the student should be able to perform certain open inventor tasks. I assign daily programming variations drived from the book. The accumulative effect is to have a student capable of maintain or developing applications in Open Inventor. The logical extension of the programming language is to develop using SGI tools or TGS tools. I think the Inventor Mentor book is one of the most prized Open Inventor books on the market. I adhere to the book when teaching Open Inventor exclusively. The Open Inventor book sheds a new light on the next five weeks which moves into VRML and Java. Interestingly, the mechanizms for controling nodes in the scene graph using Java are very similar to Open Inventor Node manipulation.

Open Inventor is a C++ object oriented 3D graphics API that allows high level programming for OpenGL. It integrates into Visual Studio. Even though Open Inventor is an old product it is still widely used in various visualization systems around the world. Hollywood, advanced engineering systems, and scientific projects that require superior 3D visualization are still using this product. The Inventor Mentor book allows you to quickly get familiar with Open Inventor.

With Open inventor you do not need to worry about rendering or drawing, all you do is define 3D objects and their surface properties (color, texture, ambient light, transparancy, reflective properties, etc.). You define object position/motion and interconnectedness via a scene graph. It is like building with lego.

In 1996 I created a product prototype for an industrial robot visualization system. A ported ABB robot controller directly controlled the motion in the 3D simulation. A simulated Arc-Welding robot was created by converting the corresponding CAD drawings for the robots components into VRML. I used kinematic transforms (Sheith-Uicker) to connect the robot links together in the scene graph framework provided by Open Inventor. The result was a very realistic robot simulation that was nicer looking than anything you have seen on XBOX 360. The OS window seemed like a window in a wall through which you could see into a shop floor with a robot in action.

With the help of the Inventor Mentor I was able to get a working prototype ready in three weeks. I did not need the Open Inventor C++ Reference Manual or the Open Inventor Toolmaker during these three first weeks (but I used them later). I continued working with this product for four more years, and it was one of the most fun tools I have ever worked with.

10 months ago I contacted TGS about buying Open inventor. Unfortunately they wanted $4,000 for each development license, a $1,000 for each run-time license (one per unit), and $300,000 for a universal (for all units) run-time license. This was too expensive, otherwise I might have used it today as well.

I was surprised when I received the package, because the packing was so poor. The book was actually posted in a plastic bag as the only packing, which is not protecting the book sufficiently.