(See "OpenGL-Related Libraries" for more information about Open Inventor.) Also, there is a higher-level, object-oriented toolkit, Open Inventor, which is built atop OpenGL, and is available separately for many implementations of OpenGL. GLU is a standard part of every OpenGL implementation. The OpenGL Utility Library (GLU) provides many of the modeling features, such as quadric surfaces and NURBS curves and surfaces. With OpenGL, you must build up your desired model from a small set of geometric primitives - points, lines, and polygons.Ī sophisticated library that provides these features could certainly be built on top of OpenGL. Such commands might allow you to specify relatively complicated shapes such as automobiles, parts of the body, airplanes, or molecules. Similarly, OpenGL doesn't provide high-level commands for describing models of three-dimensional objects. To achieve these qualities, no commands for performing windowing tasks or obtaining user input are included in OpenGL instead, you must work through whatever windowing system controls the particular hardware you're using. OpenGL is designed as a streamlined, hardware-independent interface to be implemented on many different hardware platforms. This interface consists of about 150 distinct commands that you use to specify the objects and operations needed to produce interactive three-dimensional applications.
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OpenGL is a software interface to graphics hardware.