Last Updated: 08 / 04 / 2009

NVIDIA® SceniX™ Details

The SceniX scene management engine is an object-oriented programming library for creating custom scene graph based applications. It provides a comprehensive set of C++ classes for developers to easily combine, extend, and create their own fast and reliable graphics applications.

As a scene graph, SceniX provides a reusable, hierarchical data structure that describes a 3D scene’s objects in space, time, appearance, and in relationship with one another. SceniX has been used to power many highly interactive environments for a variety of purposes, including: automotive styling, gas and oil data exploration, scientific and commercial visualization, simulation, modeling, and interactive training. SceniX is not a complete application, but rather is an important underpinning of a high performance application that then adds its own primary capabilities. SceniX focuses on representing the 3D scene as interactively as possible and enabling high quality, efficient interactive rendering. Other components of the scene graph, such as physics, are not included but can be integrated.

SceniX Advantages

Each application has different requirements, with SceniX giving developers maximum flexibility in customizing its engine to meet the specific needs of their application, market and end users. Of particular development value:

Performance	SceniX maximizes the performance of graphics hardware by reducing the amount of data and grouping related data sets. Its hierarchical structure allows the culling of objects and their related data not needed for rendering the scene, and sorts data so that related objects are rendered at the same time.
Productivity	SceniX manages the interface to graphics hardware, significantly reducing the amount of OpenGL programming required to build interactive applications.
Portability	SceniX handles the lower-level tasks of rendering and transferring data, so porting your application to another platform can be as simple as a recompile.
Scalability	SceniX scales performance across multiple GPUs in a system or across a sophisticated graphics cluster, removing a significant development burden for data and/or performance intense applications.
Shading	SceniX takes advantage of modern GPU shading by fully integrating Cg/CgFX, abstracting the low-level work required to organize and deliver the shader data to the GPU.

SceniX Capabilities

The NVIDIA SceniX engine is a C++ scene graph API that is DLL based, thread safe, and leverages the latest innovations in OpenGL and Cg. It supports 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows and Linux, and allows 32 & 64-bit development on the same system. Highly extendable, the scene graph includes the following capabilities within its core:

Performance Focus

Effective Tree Optimization with extensive scene methods and controls
Optimized memory and render-list management
Frustum and Occlusion Culling, Level of Detail (LOD) handling
Multiple Render Paths, including: Vertex Buffer Objects (VBO), Display Lists, Vertex Arrays
Write-Mapping for saving large files more quickly
Distributed GPU Rendering

Object Support

Geometry: Indexed Triangles, Triangle Fans, TriStrips, Quad Meshes, Quad Strips, Lines, LineStrips, Points
Cameras: Perspective, Orthographic, Stereo
Lights: Point, Spot, Direct
Parent/Child Hierarchies, Group, Billboard, FlipbookAnimation, LOD, Transform, AnimatedTransform, Switch
Custom/arbitrary application/user data for objects

Animation

Interpolation-Based and Frame-based animation
Separate Translation, Scale, Rotation animation keys
Quaternion rotations about definable transform points
Vertex Animation and Mesh Skinning (CPU or GPU)
Flipbook Animation for cycling object visibility
Playback control (start/stop, forward/backward, swinging/looping)

Interaction

Choice of camera manipulators: Trackball, Fly Thru, Walk Thru, and Animation
Selection queues by highlighted edges or bounding box
Picking/selecting via ray intersection, and Tree Searching
Interactive Zoom, Orbit, Pan, Dolly, and Zoom Selected or Extents
Affine transforms, mirroring, smooth rotations
Triggers and Behaviors, dynamic transforms and switch nodes.

Interactive Rendering

Full shader support for the latest GPU capabilities via CgFX 2.2
Flexible Display Modes: Points, Wireframe, Shaded, Textured, Effected, Lit/Unlit
Multi-Pass Anti-Aliasing (MPAA ) for seamless integration of Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (GPU or CPU) via: Accumulation Buffers, Read Pixels, P-Buffers, or Framebuffer Objects (FBO)
Transparency Options: Stippled, Blended, Order Independent (P-Buffer or FBO)
Multi-Pass Rendering at the Shader Level (multi-pass effects), Geometry-level, and Scene-level
Interactive Shadow Maps w/ Intensity
Scene Effects: Depth of Field, Fog, Interactive Clipping planes
Textures: 1D, 2D, 3D, CubeMap, Rectangle, 1DArray, 2DArray
Multi-Texture
Backdrop images
Volume Rendering (requires a Quadro FX GPU)
Cluster support via asymmetric and overlapping viewing frustums
Distributed GPU Rendering via NVIDIA CompleX on Quadro Plex systems for accommodating massive scene complexity.

File Formats

Native scene formats NBF (binary), NVSG (ASCII)
Scene import for COLLADA, COLLADA FX, VRML2.0/WRL, OpenFlight, OBJ, PLY, and others via custom plug-ins. COLLADA support includes shader definitions, animation and skinning.
Image format support includes: BMP, DDS, JPG, GIF, HDR-HDRI, Vertical Cross Cubemaps, OpenEXR, PNG, RGB, TGA, TIF, and others via custom plug-ins.
Textures support most OpenGL formats, including fixed, float, compressed, and some special packed data types.
Shaders in HLSL, CgFX (e.g., from FXComposer), and MetaSL (from mental mill)
Real-time, High Definition Video via SDI interface

GPU Capabilities

CG 2.2 and OpenGL 2.1 or higher shaders, including support for geometry shaders and texture arrays
Scalable with SLI
30-bit Color
Stereo
Distributed GPU Rendering via NVIDIA CompleX on Quadro Plex systems for large scale visualization

SceniX Viewer Sample

MFC-based GUI for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows
Single viewport navigation and a basic interface exposing nearly all SceniX capabilities, with the entire file interchange capabilities of SceniX
Material Editor (for defined shaders) with Drag and Drop material assignment

System Requirements:

OpenGL Capabilities
- Minimum: OpenGL 1.4 compliant graphics board
- Recommended: OpenGL 2.1 or higher
- Ideal NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics board
Microsoft Visual C++ 2003, 2005, 2008, and .NET Framework (on Windows)
Multiple Platform Support:
- Windows 2000/XP/Vista 32-bit/64-bit
- Linux 32-bit/64-bit
Optional:
- Cluster rendering; stereo output supported
- NVIDIA Quadro® HD SDI video i/o
- 30-bit color display