This group node performs a push (save) of the traversal state before traversing its children and a pop (restore) after traversing them. This isolates the separator's children from the rest of the scene
graph. A separator can include lights, cameras, coordinates, normals, bindings, and all other properties. Separators are relatively inexpensive, so they can be used freely within scenes.
The
SoSeparator node provides
caching of state during rendering and bounding box computation. This feature can be enabled by setting the
renderCaching and
boundingBoxCaching fields. By default, these are set to
AUTO, which means that Inventor decides whether to build
a cache based on internal heuristics.
Separators can also perform culling during rendering and picking. Culling skips over traversal of the separator's children if they are not going to be rendered or
picked, based on the comparison of the separator's bounding box with the current view volume. Culling is controlled by the
renderCulling and
pickCulling fields. These are also set to
AUTO by default; however, render culling can
be expensive (and can interfere with render caching), so the
AUTO heuristics leave it disabled unless specified otherwise.
static void setNumRenderCaches(int howMany)
By default, each separator node maintains 2 render caches. (This is to allow two different representations, such as filled and wire-frame, to both be cached.) The setNumRenderCaches() method sets the number of render caches each
separator will have. Each render cache uses memory, so increasing this number may increase the memory requirements of the application. This method affects only separators that are created after it is called,
not separators that were created before. Setting the number of caches to 0 turns off render caching globally from then on.