Re: Streamlining the OpenGL visualisation work...

A Dijous 23 Octubre 2003 22:44, Herman Bruyninckx va escriure:
> Does somebody have a good vision on the OpenGL visualisation efforts
> that have been growing here and there without too much coordination?

So little vision. ....

>
> I can think of support libraries such as libQGLViewer
> <http://www-imagis.imag.fr/Membres/Gilles.Debunne/CODE/QGLViewer/>
> which provide the kind of wrappers that we have been developping too,
> but in a more "professional" way. libQGLViewer has support for
> some things that are directly useful to Orocos (such as the keyframe,
> x3dViewer and SpinningFrame examples show).
> (libQGLViewer has Qt bindings only.)
> Or we work towards integration with larger projects such as
>  Coind3D/OpenInventor <http://www.coin3d.org>
>    (has Gtk, Xt/Motif and Qt bindings, as well as Win32. And C++, Java and
>    Python APIs), or
>  OpenCascade <http://www.opencascade.com/>, or
>  Blender <www.blender.org>?

QGLViewer give a class to render OpenGL code in a widget with some kind of 
more stuff.

Coin3d is a great library, using wht OpenInventor API. You can use OpenGL 
inside it, but is a lot of easy use  the OpenInventor API to create scenes.

There's some kind of discussions about to use OpenInventor (Coin, TGS, SGI) 
libraries or OpenGL to rendes scenes that need a lot of perfomance for 
dynamicals simulations, etc. There are people that say that you have to go to 
OpenGL if you need a lot of performance and there are people that say that 
this is a myth and you can do it with OI. I don't know. For my experience, 
for a scene of a robot cell with several elements with animations, etc, OI do 
it perfectly. Maybe milions of elements movings around will have some 
problem, but probably it will be a hardware limit, not a software limit.

OpenInventor API is well documented is clear and the learning curve is not 
very dificult. I have to say that there isn't anything easy and any library 
needs some effort.

I think that OpenCascade  is a CAD library, very complete that offers you a 
lot of things. However, althought OI is clear, there are a lots of manuals, 
tutorials, etc, OpenCascade is a very big monster of code (~120MB a complete 
distribution) without (at least some months ago) any manual, tutorial to 
begin. I think that OpenCascade do a lot of thins: to many things. ... Well, 
I have looked now the OpenCascade and it have been remodeled. I have to look 
it. 

About Blender I don't have any idea. But it looks like very well.

Regards,

Leo