Introduce - GView/IVView/Inventor

Inventor is an object oriented graphics library built on top of OpenGL, which is utilized to create 3D graphics applications. Inventor simplifies OpenGL, using nodes to represent properties of an object such as translation and rotation. This toolkit provides for the creation and manipulation of a 3D hierarchical scene, which is comprised of these nodes.

Scenes created with Inventor are stored in a file known as a scene graph. Inventor files have an extension of .iv, and can be examined with the ivview and gview programs. ivview allows us to see what is being displayed by the .iv file, while gview allows us to actually manipulate the .iv file nodes through a graphical interface. While a graphical interface may be preferable, Inventor files can be created and modified with a text editor as well.

CAD programs such as Pro/Engineer and SolidWorks can export parts or assemblies created with these programs. Pro/Engineer can export directly to Inventor, while SolidWorks uses VRML as an intermediate format. The Inventor files for any parts (or assemblies) necessary for your final project can be created in this manner.

It should be noted that Inventor was originally a commercial library, which was later open sourced under the LGPL as OpenInventor. For the purposes of this module, both "Inventor" and "OpenInventor" refer to the OpenInventor graphics library.