Introduction to the OpenSceneGraph

The OpenSceneGraph is an portable, high level graphics toolkit for the development of high peformance graphics applications such as flight simulators, games, virtual reality or scientific visualization. Providing an object orientated framework on top of OpenGL, it frees the developer from implementing and optimizing low level graphics calls, and provide many additional utilities for rapid development of graphics applications.

The project was started as a hobby by Don Burns in 1998, as means of porting a hang gliding simulator written on top of the Performer scene graph running on IRIX to what was then a humble Linux PC. In 1999, Robert Osfield began helping out with the simulator development and ported the scene graph element to Windows. In september 1999 the source code was open sourced, and the openscenegraph.org website was born, with Robert taking over as project lead and Don remaining focused on the hang gliding simulator.

In April 2001, in response to growing interest in the project around the world, Robert went fulltime on the project, setting up OpenSceneGraph Professional Services providing commericial support, consultancy services and training. At the end of 2001 Don also formed his own company Andes Computer Engineering and participates in the development and support of OpenSceneGraph as well as complimentary projects like OpenProducer and BlueMarbleViewer.

What is a Scene Graph?

A scene graph isn't a complete game or simulation engine, although it may be one of the main components of such an engine; it's primary focus is representation of your 3d worlds, and efficient rendering thereof. Physics models, collision detection and audio are left to other development libraries that a user will integrate with. The fact that scene graphs don't typically integrate all these features is actually a really good thing: it aids interoprability with clients' own applications and tools and allows it to serve many varied markets from games, visual simulation, virtual reality, scientific and commercial visualization, training through to modeling programs.

Benefits that Scene Graphs provide

• Performance
Scene graphs provide an excellent framework for maximizing graphics performance. A good scene graph employs two key techniques - culling of the objects that won't be seen on screen, and state sorting of properties such as textures and materials, so that all similar objects are drawn together. Without culling the CPU, buses and GPU will all become swamped by many times the amount of data than they actually require to represent your scenes accurately. The hierarchical structure of the scene graph makes this culling process very efficient, for instance a whole city can be culled with just a few operations! Without state sorting, the the buses and GPU will thrash between states, stalling the graphics pipeline and destroying graphics throughput. As GPU's get faster and faster, the cost of stalling the graphics pipeline is also going up, so scene graphs are becoming ever more important.
• Productivity
Scene graphs take away much of the hard work required to develop high performance graphics applications. The scene graph manages all the graphics for you, reducing what would be thousands of lines of OpenGL down to a few simple calls. Furthermore, one of most powerful concepts in Object Oriented programming is that of object composition, enshrined in the Composite Design Pattern, which fits the scene graph tree structure perfectly and makes it a highly flexible and reusable design - in real terms this means that it can be easily adapted to solve your problems. Scene graphs also often come additional utility libraries which range from helping users set up and manage graphics windows to importing of 3d models and images. All this together allows the user to achieve a great deal with very little coding. A dozen lines of code can be enough to load your data and create an interactive viewer!
• Portability
Scene graphs encapsulate much of the lower level tasks of rendering graphics and reading and writing data, reducing or even eradicating the platform specific coding that you require in your own application. If the underlying scene graph is portable then moving from platform to platform can be as simple as recompiling your source code.
• Scalability
Along with being able to dynamic manage the complexity of scenes automatically to account for differences in graphics performance across a range of machines, scene graphs also make it much easier to manage complex hardware configurations, such as clusters of graphics machines, or multiprocessor/multipipe systems such as SGI's Onyx. A good scene graph will allow the developer to concentrate on developing their own application while the rendering framework of the scene graph handles the different underlying hardware configurations.

The OpenSceneGraph - a robust, high peformance Open Source scene graph

• Performance
Supports view frustum culling, occlusion culling, small feature culling, Level Of Detail (LOD) nodes, state sorting, vertex arrays and display lists as part of the core scene graph. These together make the OpenSceneGraph one of the highest performance scene graph available. User feedback is that performance matches or surpasses that of much more established scene graphs such as Performer, VTree, Vega Scene Graph and Java3D! The OpenSceneGraph also supports easy customization of the drawing process, which has allowed implementation of Continuous Level of Detail (CLOD) meshes on top the scene graph. These allow the visualization of massive terrain databases interactively, examples of this approach can be found at Vterrain.org and TerrainEngine.com, both of which integrate with the OpenSceneGraph.
• Productivity

The core scene graph provides encapsulate the majority of OpenGL functionality including latest extensions, provides rending optimizations such as culling and sorting, and a whole set of add on libraries which make it possible to develop high peformance graphics applications very rapidly. The application developer is freed to concentrate on content and how that content is controlled rather than low level coding.

Combining lessons learned from established scene graphs like Performer and Open Inventor, with modern software engineering methods like Design Patterns, along with a great deal of feedback early on in the development cycle, it has been possible to design a library that is clean and extensible. This has made it easy for users to adopt to the OpenSceneGraph and to integrate it with their own applications.

For reading and writing databases an the database library (osgDB) adds support for a wide variety of database formats via a extensible dynamic plugin mechansim - the distribution now includes 33 seperate plugins for loading various 3D and Image data formats. 3D Database loaders include OpenFlight (.flt), TerraPage (.txp) including multi-threading support, LightWave (.lwo), Alias Wavefront (.obj), Carbon Graphics GEO (.geo), 3D Studio MAX (.3ds), Peformer (.pfb), Quake Character Models (.md2). Direct X (.x), and Inventor Ascii 2.0 (.iv)/ VRML 1.0 (.wrl), Designer Workshop (.dw) and AC3D (.ac) and the native .osg ASCII format. Image loaders include .rgb, .gif, .jpg, .png, .tiff, .pic, .bmp, .dds (include compressed mip mapped imagery), .tga and qucktime (under OSX). A whole set of high quality, anti-aliased fonts can also be loaded via the freetype plugin.

The scene graph also has a set of Node Kits which are seperate libraries, that can be compiled in with your applications or loaded in at runtime, which add support for particle systems (osgParticle), high quality anti-aliased text (osgText) and navigational light points (osgSim).

The community has also developed a number of additional Node Kits such as osgNV (which includes support for NVidia's vertex, fragment, combiner etc extension and NVidia's Cg shader language.), Demeter (CLOD terrain + integration with OSG). osgCal (which integrates Cal3D and the OSG), osgVortex (which integrates the CM-Labs Vortex physics enginer with OSG) and a whole set libraries that integrating the leading Windowing API's Links can be found in the bazaar sections on the download page of OpenSceneGraph webiste.

The project has also been integrated with VR Juggler and Vess virtual realilty the frameworks, with others in developments.

• Portability
The core scene graph has also been designed to have minimal dependency on any specific platform, requiring little more than Standard C++ and OpenGL. This has allowed the scene graph to be rapidly ported to a wide range of platforms - originally developed on IRIX, then ported to Linux, then to Windows, then FreeBSD, Mac OSX, Solaris, HP-UX and we even a report of successful porting to PlayStation2!
The core scene graph library being completely windowing system independent makes it easy for users to add their own window-specific libraries and applications on top. In the distribution there is already the osgProducer library which integrates with OpenProducer, and in the Bazaar found at openscenegrph.org/download/ one can find examples of applications written on top of GLUT, Qt, MFC, WxWindows and SDL. Users have also integrated it with Motif, and X.
• Scalability
The scene graph will not only run on portables all the way up to Onyx Infinite Reality Monsters, but also supports the multiple graphics subsystems found on machines like a mulitpipe Onyx. This is possible because the core scene graph supports multiple graphics contexts for both OpenGL Display Lists and texture objects, and the cull and draw traversals have been designed to cache rendering data locally and use the scene graph almost entirely as a read-only operation. This allows multiple cull-draw pairs to run on multiple CPU's which are bound to multiple graphics subsystems. Support for multiple graphic context and multi-threading is all available out of the box via osgProducer - all the examples in the distribution can run multi-pipe just by use a simple configuation file.

The project is currently in beta, which means the main core features are now in place, with a 1.0 release in second half of 2003. Despite the beta development status, the project has already earned the reputation as the leading open source scene graph, and is establishing itself as a viable alternative to the commercial scene graphs. Numerous companies, university researchers and graphics enthusiasts have already adopted the OpenSceneGraph for their projects, all over the world. Examples of the wide variety of applications already developed ontop of the OpenSceneGraph include Blue Marble Viewer, Virtual Terrain Project, Combat Simulator Project, OSG-Edit. This is just a snippet of the projects that use the project, more examples can be found on the screenshot pages and bazaar on the website.

Getting started

The binary distribution contains just the libraries (.dll's /.so's) and example executables. This is suitable for using the OpenSceneGraph with an application that has already been compiled but depends at runtime on the OpenSceneGraph.

The development distribution contains the libraries (.dll's /.so's), example executables, include files, and source to the examples. This is suitable for developers using the OpenSceneGraph.

The source distribution contains all the source and include files required to build the OpenSceneGraph from scratch, and is ideal if you want to learn more about how the scene graph works, how to extend it, and to track down and fix any problems that you come across.

If you are using a source distribution then read the installation instructions for how to get the OpenSceneGraph compiling and installed on your system. You may also need to download libraries that parts of the OpenSceneGraph depend upon, such as Producer. Check the dependencies list for further details.

For full instructions of how to run the examples read the examples page.

Learning how to use the OpenSceneGraph

The OpenSceneGraph distribution comes with a reference guide for each of the component libraries - osg, osgDB, osgUtil, osgText, osgSim, osgParticle and osgProducer, a set of 42 examples - the source of which can be found in examples/ directory in the distribution. For questions or help which can't be easily be answered by the reference guide and examples source, one should join the mailing list (details below). There are also the beginnings of a Wiki based FAQ which may help answer a few of the common queries.

A programming guide will be available in form of a OpenSceneGraph book which is being written by Don Burns and Robert Osfield, parts of it will be available online.

Although not directly related to the OpenSceneGraph, once can learn about scene graph technology from such sources as the Open Inventor Mentor, and Performer Programming Guides. The latter is the closer in design to the OpenSceneGraph, although the Performer manuals are in C, alas. Also of use as a background to some of the techniques used is a SIGGRAPH Vis-Sim course.

The OpenSceneGraph uses OpenGL and does so with a deliberately thin layer, making it easy to control the underlying OpenGL and to extend it with OpenGL extensions. The close tie with OpenGL is also reflected in the naming of many of the OpenGL state related classes, and the parameters that they encapsulate, which means that knowledge of OpenGL itself will go a long way to understanding how to get the best out of the OpenSceneGraph. To this end it is worth obtaining a copy of the OpenGL programming guide - `Red Book` and OpenGL reference guide 'Blue Book'. The main OpenGL website is also a good source of links and further information.

Support and discussion - the osg-user mailing list

Professional support is also available in the form of confidential online, phone and onsite support and consultancy, for details contact Robert Osfield at robert@openscenegraph.com.