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I'm planning to use a 3D-engine to do visualization and animation of very large 2D-graphs of data (100k objects) using relatively simple shapes mainly boxes, circles, arcs, rounded-boxes, etc.

Further, I may, in the future, be interested in extending this visualization to the third dimension by, for instance, mapping data attributes to z-coordinate layers and transparency. This is the reason for me wanting to use an existing 3D-engine.

My preferred

  • language is C++(11)
  • backend is OpenGL and
  • platforms is at least Windows and Linux.

My primary concern right now is to be able to draw as many objects (boxes) as possible in different sizes and colors. Therefore I want the API to be vectorized with regards to specfying vertices and colors for these objects.

The animation will be a simple linear interpolation to start with.

Is OpenSceneGraph a good pick for this application or is it not suitably for doing high-performance data visualization?

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Needs more detail. By "100k objects" do you mean graph nodes? Do you want to render a static scene or a dynamic one? (Dynamic, guessing by the tags.) Are you looking for a rendering solution or a graph layout algorithm? – Anko Jan 26 at 22:21
Very dynamic rendering indeed. I'm aware of that graph-layout algorithms are demanding, O(n*log n) per iteration step, at least and maybe 100k objects is not feasible (yet). I just want to make sure that the rendering part of this doesn't become a bottleneck. – Nordlöw Jan 26 at 22:36
As per the FAQ, "What technology to use" questions are considered off-topic for this Q&A site. You might like to ask in our chat, or on one of the other sites suggested in the FAQ. – Trevor Powell Jan 27 at 7:08
@Trevor Could the question be phrased better as "How can I optimise drawing hundreds of thousands of objects?" – Anko Jan 27 at 8:03
@Anko If we know the system being used to draw, then we can probably give some guidelines. But in this day and age, guidelines for optimising drawing can go out of date pretty fast, since GPU vendors and APIs are changing every year. – Trevor Powell Jan 27 at 8:06

closed as not constructive by Byte56, Trevor Powell, Josh Petrie, Sean Middleditch, bummzack Feb 5 at 10:37

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