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.
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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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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This is the first of a series of articles about our favorite features in Insight3D written by developers on the Insight3D team, the AGI Components team, and other AGI developers that we've deemed as world experts in Insight3D.
I like lots of Insight3D features, but I've decided to write about the marker batch primitive because 1) I developed it and am therefore biased, and 2) it does lots of fancy things under the hood for performance.
Marker Batch Basics
Loosely speaking, markers are 2D images that always face the viewer, like these arrows:
Yes, I drew the arrow icon myself in Visual Studio, and no, I've never thought of a career in art. Markers are sometimes called Sprites or Billboards. They have an incredible number of uses: representing points of interest, visualizing a ton of realtime data, replacing 3D models to improve performance, and for rendering image-based effects such as clouds, smoke, fire, and vapor trails. Of course, we are looking for an excuse to code up some of these effects, so please leave a comment if you are interested.
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We’re excited to announce the release Insight3D. Visit Insight3D.com for product information, and then please give it a try. You can download it here.
Chances are that you won’t read the documentation first, so I recommend that you open …\Program Files\AGI\AGI Components 2009\r3\Examples\Insight3D\ Examples.sln; then, build and run our How To example pictured below.
This example demonstrates many of our features. In the left window is a tree of those features. When you check a feature’s box, it is displayed in the 3D window, and the its code is displayed in the bottom window. This a quick way to familiarize yourself with Insight3D.
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