[prog] General purpose 3d graphics engine

[Tauscher]

Hi,

I'm looking for some advice regarding a general purpose free and open source 3d graphics engine. After doing some research, I found out, that there are some scenegraph APIs on top of OpenGL. Thought this is not Linux specific, I hope someone here has experience in that area and can give hints to me which one to choose.

My research area is where computer science and architecture / civil engineering overlap. But I'm also interested in 3d video art and more fun stuff like small games. I started 3d programming through the scripting APIs of common 3d modelling and cad tools and went on experimenting with 3d cellular automata, shape grammars and stuff like that using python and the computer graphics kit (cgkit).

Now I want to switch to some more robust and perhaps language independent - that way learning another language (e.g. java) while using the same graphics engine could be very easy or also porting a scripted experiment to an executable solution. I have found that the main scene graph APIs (Open Scene Graph, Ogre and Open Inventor / Coin3D) mostly are C/C++ libraries, but all have different language bindings. These bindings are maintained to a different extent, e.g. pivy for Coin3D (a swig based python binding) doesn't seem to be developed any more. But perhaps this could also be a possibility to jump in and contribute to the community. Beside these wellknown engines there are also a lot of smaller unknown ones.

I would be very happy about any hint, also about pointing out other criteria for choosing the right library.

Thanks a lot.

Helga