LabVIEW 3D Picture Control Evaluation Software Discussion

[JeffBoettcher]

The LabVIEW 3D Picture Control Evaluation Software is a set of tools for LabVIEW 7.1 or later that allow the modeling and rendering of basic 3D scenes for advanced visualization in LabVIEW. Share your ideas/questions/experiences with other users here in the Discussion Forums.

[JeffBoettcher]

This forum thread existed in the old forums, but did not get migrated because it was a different type of post. Attached to the first post is a text file with the full text of the old forum thread. Attached to this thread is a ZIP file that contains attachments from the old thread - a number of images and a cool example all of which were provided by "Ben".

Please feel free to continue discussion of these tools here, sorry for the inconvenience.

[JeffBoettcher]

One last note for now - if viewing the full-text of the old thread from the TXT file above, I suggest saving it to disk and viewing it in notepad or other text viewer. Internet Explorer renders it without proper line breaks or white space, so it is very hard to follow.

[Ben]

Cool!

I get to rate someone for posting my examples.

Does feel weird though.

Ben

[Obastat]

Is there any way to do texture maping insted of solid color sins?

[Ben]

Excellent Q!

I have not figured out how to do that yet.

If you look at the code for the

Add materials.VI >>> SkinManagerCore.VI

You will see there is a method called "UpdateColorArray" where a skin type of "Color per Vertex" will cache an array.

I also poked around in the various example shapes and found that they just build a list of vertexes in 3-space for the oject.

So,
If you construct an array of vertices that represented a 3-d raster scan of a surface then an image could be rendered. I am not an expert in this area and would love to figure out to transfer a bmp or a jpg to a surface.

That is all that I can offer.

Ben

[Obastat]

thhanks, that gives me some ideas. I was also wondering if there are plans, or possibly non released vi's that support the other openGL drawing metods: points, line, lines, closed lines, triangle fan, triangle array, quad, quad aray, etc. ?

[Obastat]

I just remembered that one of the most time annoying things to me in creating my own objects was finding the normal vectors. I had a friend (good at math.. YEA!!) help me to come up with the atached vi. It takes a sudo completed object cluster that has all the verticies and plane mappings, and an array where the x cord. is 1 or -1 in the normal array. It then calculates the normal vectors for each plane, and replaces the normal array. The 1/-1 is to designate "in" and "out". basicly you have to guess whitch is correct then test till you get the correct directions. Hope this will help some people. And post if you need a better example.

[nilak]

I have developed a vi, where it accepts an array of data and plots it in 3d using the new 3d picture control. My problem is that the edges of the object are not quite visible due to the lighting. Is there a way to overlap the solid "fill" with the "line" render of the same object so that you're able to distinguish where the edges of the object are? OpenGL will only let you select one option (gl_fill, gl_line, gl_point) at a time. I've tried duplicating render scene.vi but with no luck (the polygon mode is selected via that vi). Maybe I am using the lighting wrong. I've tried all 3 types of lights (omni, spot, and directional) but they all give me similar results. I've also tried to use the add material.vi but am unsure of how that vi works since all the inputs are related to light (no materials). I've tried the color array.vi, which makes the object more colorful than a rainbow 😞 Any help is much appreciated, thanks in advance.

[Paul K]

I have been using the Labview 3D Picture Control to develop some Haptic Visualization with ur Haptic Devices (Force Feed-back).

I am in the process of animating 2 objects, and I am running the loop at 20 Hz. I notivce that if I try to go any faster, my PC is getting bogged down. I am using it on a P4 2.4 with a ATI Radeon 9000 vid card.

Does anyone have any reccomendations for Video cards I should be using with this control to optimize the performace? I am just beginning to work with OpenGL and any advice would be appreciated.