The latest OpenSceneGraph-2.8.0 stable release has now been tagged, binaries + source packages uploaded and are ready go.  The big news for this release is the introduction of a two NodeKits – osgVolume for high quality volume rendering, and osgAnimation for character and solid body animation.

Updates include:

  • New osgVolume library for volume rendering, with support for:
    • High quality GPU based Ray tracing
    • Transfer functions
    • Per pixel lighting
    • Iso surface rendering
    • Maximum Intensity Projection rendering
    • Non-power-of-two 3D textures, and 3D texture compression
    • DICOM loading for reading dicom medical data
  • New osgAnimation library for character and scene animation.
  • New plugin for reading Biovision hierarchical files (.BVH) to generate character motion animations.
  • New osgShadow support for Light Space Perspective Shadow Maps.
  • Three new scene graph widgets for placing traditional 2D capability into fully interactive 3D scenes:
    • PDF widget (based on libPoppler)
    • VNC client widget (based on libVNCServer)
    • Internet browser client widget (based on Gecko/UBrowser)
  • New plugins for loading Half-Life 2 maps and models.
  • New plugin for loaded EXR, high dynamic range imagery
  • Improvements to DatabasePager, tailored for low latency paging.
  • Improved run-time stats collection and on screen reporting.
  • Performance improvements through optimization of matrix operations.
  • Support for the OpenGL “draw instanced” extension.
  • Support for zlib compressed native .ive and .gz files
  • Improvements to COLLADA support.
  • Build reporting using CDash
  • New packaging support using CPack
  • A wide range of build and bug fixes

Downloads of source and binary packages can be found on the Downloads page. The official news items for can be found on the OpenSceneGraph-2.8 press release wiki page.

If your wish to help out by passing on news of this release the it’d really help us if you could use our SpreadingTheNews wiki page to keep tabs on what news websites have been informed so that others don’t contact them again.

Many thanks to all those who’ve helped contribute to the development and testing of this release.

Robert Osfield.