I have studied the course Computer Graphics and used OpenGL & Qt for my course project. This semester, the course Virtual Reality require us to use OpenSceneGraph.

There are some great works done by some researchers:

Continuous Penalty Forces

And the fantastic works from

I was just wondering how did they do these kind of work? What main tools or libraries did they use? Did most of the work based on OpenSceneGraph or VTK?

Recently, I also found out it might be a good choice to implement a system by writing plugins for Autodesk Maya; For example:

Moreover, do you know some largest forum for computer graphics? I only know CGTalk, however, this site is for artist I think.

Research code is usually written from scratch (possibly adapting or recycling existing research code) or based on very low level libraries like OpenMP; even if they are impressive, visualizations are usually an unimportant appendix. For example, consider crowd dynamics simulations: if you have frame by frame positions of every agent, rendering animated scenes and still frames is trivial.

Plugins for software are an application of research: you can write a plugin if you want to sell or share an useful tool, but most kinds of research can be demonstrated more usefully (not everybody owns, say, Maya...) and more easily with less than production-quality standalone cheap demos.

"Forums for computer graphics" are as vague a concept as "computer graphics".
I usually discover forums and blogs through search engine results for exotic and narrow queries: the places where interesting subjects are discussed are likely to be an interesting read because they are communities of people who care about those subjects.

Thank you so much for your detailed instruction! I have learnt a lot from this.