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Realism	Image Processing
Render realistically looking scenes through the use of GLSL shaders and multitexturing. Use up to eight texture units to simulate material layers, utilise cube maps to simulate reflections, write GLSL shader to achieve effects like bump- or displacement mapping. Build-in antialiasing techniques improve image quality, both software and hardware antialiasing is available, permanently or on idle. More...	tinySG comes with an image processing framework, allowing to do 2D image manipulation anywhere in the render pipeline. The image processor may manipulate textures, add post processing effects or support blending operations and image distortions on powerwalls or dome projections. The image processor is customisable via xml files, so new effects can be added without any recompilation. More...
Volume Rendering	Raytracing
Volumetric datasets are common in medical applications, but may also be used in simulation (e.g. fluids) or regular OpenGL scenes. tinySG may read raw files and uses DevIL to import Dicom datasets or 3D tiff files. Datasets are treated as 3D textures. Volumes are sliced depending on the cameras view, textured and blended together. Effects may be added through GLSL shader nodes. Volume nodes support transfer functions and arbitrary slice planes. More...	tinySG collaborates with it's companion project, tinyRT, a multicore raytracer. tinyRT may run in distributed mode, combining MPI and OpenMP to use available cluster resources. Both projects share the same scenegraph data structures to ease scene updates and safe memory. tinyRT may serve as a toolkit to precalculate ambient occlusion, bake shadow- or reflection textures or accelerate collision detection. More...
Distributed Rendering	Large Datasets & Render Performance
tinySG is multipipe-aware and thread-safe. It may use multiple GPUs to increase render speed on a single display or drive multiple displays like powerwalls. tinySG is able to drive clusters. It offers two cluster layers, based on Equalizer (TM) or MPI. The former focuses on generic OpenGL rendering, while the latter is specialised on raytracing and dynamic resource allocation. More...	Various scenegraph nodes of tinySG implement performance features. Group nodes may cache subtrees in display lists, geometry nodes can switch to VBOs, texture nodes use texture objects and are able to utilise PBOs. The render traversers do frustum culling or may issue render calls using state-optimised render buckets. More...
Stereoscopic Rendering	Live 3D Streaming on the Web
Stereoscopic images can be created with various techniques and many different data encodings. tinySG supports the classical ones, namely frame-sequential stereo, interleaved stereo, anaglyphic stereo and passive stereo. This feature gives an overview on the mathematical background and some guidance on how to generate interesting stereoscopic imagery. More...	Bringing 3D datasets to the web is not an easy task. Datasets tend to be large and are stored in a vast number of different file/data formats. Recent approaches with WebGL allow 3D rendering inside a compatible browser, but bandwidth issues, client hardware power requirements and security concerns remain. tinySG comes with a streaming server that renders images on the server side according to navigation commands from the client and sends the rendered frame sequence back to the browser. More...

Is there more to say?

• Cross platform: tinySG builds on Windows XP, Windows7, Linux and Irix, 32bit or 64bit.
• Quiet fast. Other scenegraphs like OpenSceneGraph or sceniX are still a bit faster than tinySG on the majority of scenes, but the gap is getting close and sometimes even in favour for tinySG.
• csgEdit2. Modify your scenes, add effects, tune render performance. This tool works at the bloody guts of tinySG.
• SDK/Module interface. Write your own importers and exporters, renderers, optimizers, or whatever you may have in mind.
• Build-in stereo support through Equalizer: Quad-buffered, passive or anaglyphic is available without any code change.
• csgBatch optimiser. Use this plugin to csgEdit to reorder, tune and optimise the scenegraph structure to achieve higher frame rates.

tinySG's basic architecture

In addition, the build system may be configured to use boost::threads and OpenMP to parallelise the render code and some algorithms. Finally, libcsg will also dynamically bind the devIL image library at runtime if found in the applications directory.

At the very bottom of the dependency graph are OpenGL and the GL wrangler library, managing OpenGL extensions. On top, libcsg is the core of tinySG, as it provides the scenegraph nodes, all the OpenGL-based render code as well as basic functionality like picking, selections, node conversions or animations.

libcsg's companion library, libcsgu, is a collection of utilities, offering geometric algorithms like Catmull/Clark or N-Patch surface subdivision, scene tree transformations like flatten transform, generic traversers, shadow generation and texture baking, half-edge topologies, generic threading and thread pools and finally a complete X window interface supporting multipipe operations and event handling on Linux and Irix.

A bunch of loaders is implemented in another set of shared libraries, namely basic support for tinySG native (I/O), vrml (I), OpenInventor (I/O), 3Dmax object (I), Lightwave object (I) and Stanford Ply (O).

Applications sitting on top of these libraries include tinySG's scene editor, csgEdit, a thin scene viewer, csgView, a command line renderer inspired by perfly, csgfly, a cluster version of csgfly based on Equalizer, as well as some demo applications like the San Jose Ball Machine or tinyPresenter.

Last but not least, tinySG comes with an SDK as the foundation for a number of plugins, most importantly:

• assimp: csgEdit dynamically binds a model loader based on assimp if present in the application directory. This provides import capabilities for over 30 different 3D file formats.
• netCDF: A plugin to import netCDF data and process it for different render techniques, like mesh representations, color-coded texture data or particles.
• Voxeliser: This plugin converts any scene into a voxels, stored in a 3D texture. It is the foundation for other modules, like particle collision detection or computational fluid dynamics.
• crtPlugin: The interface to libcrt, the raytracer library on top of libcsg. This plugin is able to hijack csgEdit's viewer windows and replace their OpenGL rendering with it's own raytracing algorithms.
• Python bindings: A swig-generated layer on the SDK allows to animate scenes or automise tasks using Python scripts.
• batchPlugin: A plugin providing batch driven scene tree optimisations, node conversions, normal calculation and restripping/remeshing. Multicore-capable.
• plyExporter: Exports tinySG scenes to Stanford ply format.