High-Level APIs

Hi all,

I’m running some experiments for my dissertation I need to visualize the data I’m generating in 3D.
Data:
Position X,Y,Z
Rotation Pitch, Roll, Yaw
Velocity
Time

The data is logged every second (sampling time), what can generate quiet easily a pretty big file.
I would like to visualize this data (that’s in text file) in the following way:

  1. A representation of the points by a geometrical shape
  2. I would like that geometrical shape to represent a rotation vector. In other words, the shape would be rotated according to pitch, roll and yaw values of the file.
  3. I would also like to be able to attach to the shape different types of data: i.e time
  4. Be able to import DXF and/or 3DS file formats -just geometry.

Well, if u r still reading, here is my question. I am pretty new to APIs, and I would like some advice about what high-level API is most suited to do the job? OpenInventor?Hoops3D? Gizmo3D? Java3D? none of the them?. Please, any suggestions would be grately appreciated.

I use Gizmo3D a lot. I know there is some kind of functionality to have transforms in the scene graph as a function of time. In your case you could position a model (from a 3ds file e.g.) and let the transform be a function of (time,heading,pitch,roll). Gizmo3D would then be able to animate this sequence and interpolate beteen the points. You could also use the scale factor as a function of time to visualize the speed…