The first AGI Components release for 2010 is now available on ADN. This release includes the solid primitive: a new primitive for visualizing solids such as ellipsoids and boxes, as shown below.
A new overview, available in our online help, explains how to use the solid primitive, including using visual cues such as the white silhouette edge and removal of back facing lines shown above. The polyline and point batch primitive now have an optional outline with a unique size, color, and translucency. This small feature adds a nice visual cue:
Download AGI Components 2010 r1 from ADN and give these new features a try.
All surface images in Insight3D are placed on the Earth where the edges of the image align with latitudinal and longitudinal lines and the top edge is north. Several customers have asked if they could map an image where that is not the case, where they have the latitude and longitude coordinates of each corner.
Fig. 1 shows an image captured from the viewpoint of a simulated UAV camera. While the image itself is exactly as it was, the image is not correctly positioned on the terrain. As mentioned, the image edges align with latitudinal and longitudinal lines.
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| Fig. 1 |
In fig. 2, the image’s corners have been mapped from their original coordinates to their actual coordinates. One can tell that the camera took this image from the southwest.
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| Fig. 2 |
This capability has been added to Insight3D’s Surface Mesh Primitive for our upcoming r8 release. I’ll wait until r8 is out to discuss the new interfaces and how this method differs from projecting an image onto the terrain.
In this post, I’ll discuss how we use OpenGL to remap the image of fig. 1 to that of fig. 2.
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In this entry, I'll explain how to orient a model primitive using its ReferenceFrame and Orientation properties. We'll go through two examples. The first one orients a launch pad model on the ground:
The second example orients a satellite model in orbit:
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I'm excited to announce that we just released 2009 r7, which includes the ability to define primitives in any reference frame. Previously, primitives could only be defined in a central body's fixed or inertial frame. Now, instead of converting from the reference frame of your data to the primitive's reference frame, you can just set the primitive's ReferenceFrame property to the same reference frame of your data. Doing this is almost always more efficient and easier to code! What's even better is if the reference frame varies with time, the primitive will move during animation automatically.
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Download the latest version of Insight3D, part of AGI Components. Check out what is new and fixed.
Qt is a commonly used cross-platform application development framework. If you are building a Qt application for Windows, you can easily embed Insight3D in your application using the Qt Windows Forms Interop Framework.
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At the 2009 AGI User's Conference, we demonstrated new technology that allows Insight3D applications to be deployed over the web. While we are rolling out the new technology, you can still get started building a web application with a version of Insight3D that is available today. Because Insight3D is a .NET library, it is easy to develop and deploy your applications over the web so that they can be run in virtually any web browser on the Windows platform, and even in browser-enabled applications, like Google Earth. In the first part of this blog series, I’ll take you through the basics of getting started developing an Insight3D web application for deployment on your intranet.
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Once again, SIGGRAPH was jam packed with the latest in computer graphics. For the areas we're interested in, this year seemed a little more incremental than last year, probably because last year had big announcements, including Larrabee and OpenGL 3. Nonetheless, we were exposed to plenty of ideas that will help us keep the technology underlying Insight3D on the cutting edge. I'll hit the highlights in this post.
We tend to spend most of our time in SIGGRAPH courses. This year, my favorite one was Advances in Real-Time Rendering. Wolfgang Engel gave a good talk on deferred shading and light pre-pass. Deferred shading showed up just about everywhere at SIGGRAPH this year, and rightfully so, since it is such a cool technique. Currently, Insight3D uses so-called forward shading to allow support for a wide array of video cards.
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Hi, my name is Alex Rybak. I'm currently an intern at AGI, and I have been working on the Insight3D team ever since I started here. I've had an interest in 3D graphics for a while, and working on Insight3D has given me a lot of opportunities to explore that area. Aside from my internship here, I am a full-time student at Drexel University, where I am studying for both a B.S. and an M.S. degree in Computer Science.
Introduction
Display conditions are a very useful Insight3D feature that allow the user to specify when a primitive, globe overlay, or screen overlay is rendered. There are a number of different types of display conditions that can be used, and what's even better is that they can be combined and used together to create fancy rules for when to display an object. In this article, I will show some example uses of display conditions.
To start off, let's say we want to display a circle on the Earth around New York City when the camera is at an altitude of one million meters or less. For this, we assign the AltitudeDisplayCondition (which becomes active when the camera's altitude above the surface is within a specified interval) to a PolyLinePrimitive. Here is the code:
CentralBody earth = CentralBodiesFacet.GetFromContext().GetByName("Earth");
Cartographic newYork = new Cartographic(Trig.DegreesToRadians(-74), Trig.DegreesToRadians(40.75), 0);
SurfaceShapesResult shape = SurfaceShapes.ComputeCircleCartographic(earth, newYork, 10000);
PolylinePrimitive line = new PolylinePrimitive(shape.PolylineType, SetHint.Infrequent);
line.Set(shape.Positions);
line.Color = Color.White;
AltitudeDisplayCondition condition = new AltitudeDisplayCondition(0, 1000000);
line.DisplayCondition = condition;
SceneManager.Primitives.Add(line);
As you can see in the images below, the circle is visible only when the camera is below this altitude.
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