3D Scenes

A 3D scene is a collection of ``material'' objects, such as surfaces (constructed by a number of polygons), points and lines, living in 3D space. The two 3D scene formats I have used in this project are:

Inventor:

Inventor is two things:

• An object-oriented toolkit for developing interactive, 3D graphics.
• A file format for exchanging 3D data among applications.

I will only be using Inventor in the latter sense, i.e. as a file format, or programming language.
A technical note: Inventor V1.0 is called IRIS Inventor, whereas Inventor V2.0 is called Open Inventor. I will only be using Inventor V1.0, and I will refer to that as Inventor.
What I call a 3D scene is in Inventor terminology called a scene.
Information about Inventor can be found at the Open Inventor page.

VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language):

VRML is the standard for 3D scenes on the Web. It is based on Inventor. It has a subset of the Inventor commands, and some additional commands which are not found in Inventor; this will be exemplified later.
What I call a 3D scene is in VRML terminology called a world.
When I refer to VRML, I mean VRML V1.0; the specifications are available here.
For more information about VRML, see the VRML Forum.

Inventor and VRML are explained further later.