Appearance nodes affect an object's appearance, such as color, material properties, or texture maps. Metrics nodes contain coordinates, normals, texture coordinates, and other geometric information. Group nodes are used to collect nodes to implement a hierarchical structure. Some of them can isolate the effects of their children from the rest of the scene. Camera nodes are used to define different points of view, for example to create a guided tour through the virtual scenario.
Nodes have some further characteristics.
A name can be assigned to a node, which allows to use it later everywhere in the scene. This mechanism, called instancing , reduces the necessary memory capacity because only one copy of the node is allocated and it can be referenced multiple times. The nodes 1.-5. represent a subset of Open Inventor. Extensions have been necessary in order to establish a communication capacity of the language. With this feature, large and complex scenes can be composed from a library of smaller objects.