I'm trying to write an application that can take DEM data and spit out a format recognizable by OSG (OpenSceneGraph) in C++. I have been unable to find a driver that supports osg/ive format for GDAL, and I wouldn't know where to begin writing my own. If there's another way to do what I'm asking, I'm open to it, but I've had success loading DEM's in GDAL so it seems the path of least resistance for now.
I don't know of one - OSG's native format isn't really a standard, it's just a dump of the tree structure (it's not even particularly optimal for OSG!).
I would probably pick a 'standard' DEM format that OSG can output and GDAL can read. There are a lot of examples of output plugins with OSG and it's trivial to write a 'writer' yourself.
This would also mean you can obtain standard models in this format to test with.