HELP: Evaluating Performer for thesis topic.

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Jeff Bush (jbush++at++afit.af.mil)
Sat, 18 Jan 1997 22:03:54 -0500 (EST)

Hello, I am a grad student developing a 3D
rendering application involving missile/aircraft engagement.
There is current work done with Open Inventor but is too slow.
I need to evaluate Performer as an alternative and would like
some insight on a few things. If you can help me, please email
me at jbush++at++afit.af.mil. Thank you.

1) Does it work well with Motif? I'll be using it for the UI.

2) Is there an easy interface for the user to change the
viewing angle? (using mouse controls most likely)

3) The aircraft model (currently an Inventor .iv file) is
broken up in sections (engine, skin, crew...) that need to have
their visibility "toggled". Is there a way to turn a node's
visibility off other than removing it from the scene graph
heirarchy?

4) In order to turn the visibility on or off, I need to be able
to identify these aircraft sections in the database. I
understand there is a library function for loading
Inventor files. Currently
the Inventor file has the aircraft divided up with "SoLabel"s of
each section that can be searched for in the Inventor tree,
each section becomes an Inventor "child" object that can be
manipulated seperatly. Can this be done in Performer? (I
realize this might be a difficult question to answer
without more info...) If I can't, my only solution would be to
break up the .iv file into it's sections and load each
seperatly, keeping track of them myself. I'd like to avoid
this if possible.

5) The OpenInventor version had 4 viewing scenes, one main
view and 3 smaller views showing top, front and side views, all
rendering in sync. This was trivial in Inventor. Would this
also be easy to do in Performer? (Create 4 "views" of the same
scene)

6) Is there a Performer newsgroup yet?

Thanks in advance.
Any insight would be helpful. I'd actually like to get away
from Inventor due to its slow performance.

I am not subscrib5ed to this mail list any longer, so if you can
answer any questions, please respond to: jbush++at++afit.af.mil.

Capt Jeff Bush
Graduate Student in Computer Science
Air Force Institute of Technology
jbush++at++afit.af.mil
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