Tuesday 7 August 2012

Open Cascade and Open Inventor Docs

To help with development, I've got some links to some useful documents for developing with Open Inventor and Open Cascade. These are not to be mixed up.

Coin3D / Open Inventor:

Open Inventor is a standard for 3D visualisation of scientific and engineering data. It provides a scene graph for organising and presenting data in an efficient manner. Despite being two decades old, it still provides a powerful way to develop applications. Within FreeCAD we have adopted Coin3D that provides an Open Source compatible interface for developing Open Inventor programs. There is pretty good documentation from them but there are actually no really good user guides. Two generic books were written to describe how to use and further enhance and customise Open Inventor in general:

Inventor Mentor
Inventor ToolMaker

OpenCascade:

OpenCascade provides the BREP / CSG modelling functionality within FreeCAD. It also provides many of the modelling algorithms from intersections of lines/planes to creating fillets. These two 'old' documents from an early release explain the modelling and algorithms extremely clearly with source code snippets to accompany them. 


This tutorial provided by OpenCascade to get you started using their tools. I have yet to give this a go because I've found that the other documents provide more specific documentation in developing features.

*I am unsure what the copyright are on these but for convenience I've saved them to Google Docs. Nevertheless you can attempt to find these on google like I have done.

1 comment:

  1. Excellent, I didn't know about those 2 opencascade books... Thanks for sharing!

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