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# 6.2 Inventor mental ray

Inventor is a real-time 3D scene viewing technology introduced by Silicon Graphics. There is a version of mental ray called ivray that has Inventor support built in. It can be used to read scene files and display and manipulate them in realtime on the screen, and rendering and writing them back to disk. Since OpenGL and Inventor do not support custom shaders, very simple shaders are used for the realtime display. Although ivray can be used like a regular mental ray executable, this is not recommended because it is larger and takes slightly longer to start up. ivray is supported for Silicon Graphics systems only. The following additional command line options are supported:

- `-inventor`
  Enables the realtime Inventor viewing window. ivray will read the scene file up to the first `render` command and then create the Inventor window instead of rendering.

- `-ivdrawstyle` S1 S2
  Static and moving objects will be drawn using styles S1 and S2, respectively. Available styles are `shade` (shaded), `wire` (wireframe), and `box` (bounding box). The default is `shade wire`.

- `-ivleaf on|off`
  If on, use the leaf instance list to collect objects instead of replicating the mental ray scene graph as an Inventor scene graph. This is useful for scenes with multiple instancing. The default is `off`.

- `-ivout "`filename`"`
  Write the scene as an Inventor scene file named filename.

- `-ivrendercache on|off`
  Enable or disable Inventor object caching. This is on by default.
- `-ivstrips on|off`
  Enable or disable triangle strips. Strips slightly increase tessellation time but can significantly improve display performance. Strips are enabled by default.

Next: 6.3 Environment Variables Up: 6. Command Line Options Previous: 6.1 mental ray