IRIS Performer

The main components of IRIS Performer are the two libraries libpr and libpf.

• libpr is a low-level library that provides optimized rendering functions, state control, and other functions that are fundamental to real-time graphics. It provides highly optimized rendering loops for rendering a wide variety of geometric primitives.

• libpf is a visual simulation development environment that layers a multiprocessing database traversal and rendering system on libpr. It supports multiprocessing, hierarchical scene construction, multiple channels, culling to each channel's field-of-view, and frame-rate control.

Figure 6-6 : IRIS Performer Library Hierarchy You can choose the IRIS Performer libraries that best suit your needs. You may want to build your own toolkits on top of libpr, the low-level, high-performance library, or you may choose to take advantage of the visual simulation environment that libpf provides. Note that functions from libpf make calls to libpr functions so you don't necessarily have to use the libpr functions directly.

IRIS Performer doesn't define a file format; it imports files from many standard database formats at run time. Some of the database formats supported by IRIS Performer are shown in Table 6-1.

Database Formats Supported by Performer

Format Name	Description
BIN	Silicon Graphics format
DWB	Designer's Workbench format
DXF	AutoCAD" format
FLT	MultiGen(TM) FLIGHT format
IV	Inventor format
OBJ	Wavefront Technologies Model format