The ScaleViz extension provides support for cluster rendering, remote rendering, multipipe rendering, and immersive Virtual Reality. Cluster rendering has been introduced since version 6.0 of Open Inventor™, whereas multipipe rendering and immersive VR were supported previously in the MultiPipe extension, which is now incorporated into ScaleViz. ScaleViz also substantially extends Open Inventor capabilities for remote visualization.
![[Important]](../../images/important.jpg) | |
ScaleViz is a separately licensed extension. You must have a ScaleViz license in addition to your Open Inventor license string. One of its fields specifies the maximum number of render nodes allowed. If its value is zero, multipipe rendering and immersive VR is allowed, but not cluster rendering. |
ScaleViz brings scalable capabilities to Open Inventor applications for achieving high performance, handling very large data, and enabling collaboration. It can be used to:
Accelerate application performance by using additional hardware resources to overcome performance bottlenecks due to large data or display resolution
Support display configurations such as multi-display high-resolution and immersive VR displays
Support enhanced remote rendering, for instance for building visualization servers providing remote access to very large data and/or high performance hardware resources.
Open Inventor can provide two remote rendering facilities which should not be confused.
Using standard remote rendering the user logs in from a local client machine onto a remote server machine and the application runs on this remote server machine, while displaying on the local machine. This is covered in Chapter 27, Remote Rendering.
Using ScaleViz, the user logs in on a local machine and the application runs on the local machine, while rendering can be delegated to a remote server. Data loading may also be achieved on the remote server.
In both cases the rendering is performed on the remote machine/cluster. Standard remote rendering does not take full advantage of cluster rendering and requires a third party tool such as VNC as middleware for transporting images and to display the application’s user interface. ScaleViz is self contained and offers better interactive user experience with high-performance remote rendering.
ScaleViz provides support for large tiled displays like a RealityCenter™, immersive multi-wall displays like the CAVE™ and Holobench™, as well as display of composited images on the user’s machine. It supports multi-threaded rendering on multipipe machines, head and hand tracking, active and passive stereo modes, edge blending, and much more. Any VRCO (www.vrco.com) trackd™ -compatible tracking system can be used with ScaleViz. The multipipe viewer classes replace the standard viewer classes, allowing Open Inventor applications to be “cross display” as well as cross platform. Using ScaleViz, the same application can run on displays ranging from a laptop to a desktop to a CAVE.
The ScaleViz extension also provides tracking support and default, customizable behaviors (navigation, head tracking, 3D cursor, etc.) adapted to immersive applications using tracking devices, wands, and other input devices.
ScaleViz includes support for cluster rendering using multiple computers, as well as multipipe rendering, where one computer addresses multiple graphics boards.
Cluster rendering and multipipe rendering modes support both tiled and immersive display configurations. Multipipe rendering is limited to the number of graphics boards that will fit into a single machine, whereas cluster rendering allows multiple machines, and therefore any number of graphics boards. Cluster rendering also allows compositing the results of rendering on multiple machines onto the application’s screen.
The following terms will be used throughout this chapter: