OpenGL would have been better if that role had been taken by Iris Inventor.[0]
Instead it became a rite of passage for every OpenGL beginner to reimplement Inventor on their own way, either from scratch or playing Tetris with different kinds of libraries.
Meanwhile, other graphical SDKs always provided such APIs.
By the way, the best 3D API back then was Renderman, the genesis for modern shading languages.
Instead it became a rite of passage for every OpenGL beginner to reimplement Inventor on their own way, either from scratch or playing Tetris with different kinds of libraries.
Meanwhile, other graphical SDKs always provided such APIs.
By the way, the best 3D API back then was Renderman, the genesis for modern shading languages.
https://www.amazon.com/RenderMan-Companion-Programmers-Reali...
[0] Yes there was Open Inventor afterwards, but its story is a bit convoluted.