Open Inventor is an object oriented scene graph library implemented in C++ layered on top of OpenGL. It was originally developed by SGI.

The aim of this repository is to integrate patches applied by various Linux distributions and to apply build fixes for macOS. It is based on an import of SGI's CVS repository at :pserver:[email protected]:/cvs.

Currently, patches from Fedora and Debian are included. It also includes bug fixes, most notably for font rendering on 64 bit Linux platforms. A CMake build system has been added. It can be used instead of the traditional Makefiles. The precompiled font library libFL_i386.a and unused RPM .spec files have been removed.

You can build with CMake like this:

git clone https://github.com/aumuell/open-inventor
mkdir open-inventor-build
cd open-inventor-build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/inventor ../open-inventor
make -j10
make install

The last step is optional, as all the programs that do not try to read from hard-coded paths also work from the build directory.

The included README.FIRST has instructions on how to use the original make build system.

For building on macOS, there is a Homebrew formula based on this repository.

Refer to SGI's Open Inventor page (archive link) for more information.

There are also helpful books for studying Open Inventor:

• The Inventor Mentor: Programming Object-Oriented 3D Graphics With Open Inventor, Release 2 (html, pdf)
  Josie Wernecke
  Addison-Wesley, 1994
  ISBN: 978-0-201-62495-3

  This book illustrates how to use Open Inventor.

• The Inventor Toolmaker: Extending Open Inventor, Release 2 (html, pdf)
  Josie Wernecke, Open Inventor Architecture Group
  Addison-Wesley, 1994
  ISBN: 978-0-201-62493-9

  This book covers how to extend the functionality of Open Inventor.

• MeVisLab Open Inventor, a further development of the code open sourced by SGI, available as part of the MeVisLabOpenSource_MeVisLabSDK on the MeVisLab download page. It comes with Qt GUI bindings (SoQtMeVis).

• Open Inventor Toolkit by ThermoFisher Scientific is a closed source derivative of SGI Open Inventor.

• Coin3D, a clean room open source reimplementation of the Open Inventor API. Together with this, bindings for many different GUI tool kits, such as Qt (SoQt and Quarter), X11 (SoXt), and Windows (SoWin) are provided. Commercial support has ended, but still maintained on GitHub.