My Big Book of Grievances and Bugs concerning the new 3D Surface

[X.]

Just found this old post of mine listing a few other bugs of those objects.

I must confess that having starting dabbling with XControls and being struck by how little almost zero flexibility is left to move things around WITHIN an XControl, I can fathom the constraints the developers of these objects have had to fight with. Still...

[QFang]

So this seems like a great thread for me to post in. I'm just now getting back to the irksome process of trying to use the 3D surface plot object and the 3D waterfall object.

I have encountered many bugs and "features" while working with these to get where I am, some I found work-arounds for. The only one I remember rigth this instant is where if you do a nicer/fancy (dependent on personal preference) GUI, then you might be tempted to make the gray borders transparent. . well you can, but the "Projection palette" and "color ramp" backdrops refuse to become transparent so it just looks rather ugly.

Other features, or "bugs" is that you sometimes have to play tricks with "changing" a property to force a proper update/redraw.. I'll post back when/if I can nail down more sepcific details.

Oh, and if you use property node to move a cursor around (so you can step more accurately than when you are using the mouse), the cursors no longer "snap"... if this is not a bug, it is at the very least very anoying as it forces you to use the mouse if you want to snap, but if you have 200+ data sets along one axis, going from data set 198 to 199 along that axis is... well, not really possible. (So you put down two buttons for "nudge up" and "nudge down").

Other than that I've seen/experienced most of the bugs previously posted in this thread.

Is there a good alternative out there? I have no big choice in the matter, I NEED 3D visualization, often for hundreds of "traces" where each trace has hundreds to a few thousand points. I need good zoom/pan/tilt controls, I need cursors (with planes) that can snap when you update the position programatically. It would be nice to have a better way to change the color ramp and colors. Also need to be able to export/print the 3D View and so on and so forth.

This, by the way, is the 2012 Beta testing time.... so we should make sure to participate and make our voices loud and heard through the Beta program too.. might stand a better chance of gathering support to fix and improve these then..

I'll be back, but feel free to post in the mean time! 🙂 -I attached a screen of a (smaller) data set with 78 traces in it. I had to use "value pairs" and decimate it with empty strings to get the date/time to plot correctly on the time axis too.. not sure if that is a bug or a feature, but it sucks since I suddenly have to micro manage that time axis myself, and of course cursors report the numeric value instead of the string in the value pair, so .... yeah. 

[elset191]

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QFang wrote:

Is there a good alternative out there?

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I personally prefer the ActiveX 3D Graph you can find under the classic palette.  However, if you're on 64-bit OS this isn't an option.  I know there are some third party tools available for a price, but have not tried any of them out. 

[QFang]

Thanks, I suppose I need to try that out and see how that will work for me too.

Just real quick, would you be able to share any of your activeX utilities for working with this graph? I would certianly understand if you can't but figured it would be worth asking.

Also, looking at the handful of VI's existing to help work with the activeX component, I did not immidiately see anything in the way of cursors, do you know if that is a supported feature and if so where to dig to find it?

Thanks!

and to NI: your sales people talked about how easy and great 3D plotting would be and how perfect the 3D sensor visualisation would be for our system to map temperatures onto a 3D model. When we started implementing, we not only found bugs and bad implementation of the interpolation giving rise to wrong colors/temperatures being shown, but it also turned out that if you go beyond a couple of hundred sensor points the thing becomes ... well... less than useful, let alone the thousands of temperatures we wanted to map onto the surface. Then we moved to your 3D surface plot, and that too is bug-ridden, hard to work with and generally a pain in the ass. You really need to step it up because 3D visualization of data is here to stay and not going away anytime soon! Thank you. <steps off the soap box> 

[elset191]

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@QFang wrote:

Just real quick, would you be able to share any of your activeX utilities for working with this graph? I would certianly understand if you can't but figured it would be worth asking.

Also, looking at the handful of VI's existing to help work with the activeX component, I did not immidiately see anything in the way of cursors, do you know if that is a supported feature and if so where to dig to find it?

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There are properties available for working with everything on the ActiveX graph.  The few VIs you see are simply wrappers for a small subset of these properties.  There are certainly cursor properties, but I haven't used them extensively, and I'm not sure how fully featured they are.  There are several posts on how to manipulate the graph, particularly by Ben. This is a good starting point. His tag cloud is useful for finding all sorts of 3d posts.  I have posted an XControl I created around a 3D graph that uses a lot of the properties and implements a custom color scale, much like the new style 3D graphs.  It will be hard to follow if you're not familiar with XControls though.  I had made it significantly better since I originally posted that, but I don't have access to it anymore, since I'm at a new job.

[Tim_W.]

Hi everybody,

I am monitoring this thread for new reproducible bugs that I can report to R&D. If possible try to list clear steps or example code that can be used to replicate the buggy behavior on my side (Tim's videos from earlier in this thread were a big help in making the reporting process easy). Thanks again for your input and certainly consider taking part in the 2012 beta program.

Regards,

Tim W.

Applications Engineering

National Instruments

http://www.ni.com/support 

[X.]

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QFang wrote:

This, by the way, is the 2012 Beta testing time.... so we should make sure to participate and make our voices loud and heard through the Beta program too.. might stand a better chance of gathering support to fix and improve these then..

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Beta testing is not a time to suggest features. There is a need of a serious head-on discussion with the developers of these XControls (and in the first place why the decision of using XControls!) to make sure they have as broad a user feedback on what features are needed and which are not.

[QFang]

Certainly for new features yes, but the beta program is not at all a bad place to mention and bring up BUGS. consider if nobody in the beta program find or report bugs, yet you know they have budgeted time to fix bugs that surface during the open Beta, right? So, if we report bugs (even with existing CARs) in the Beta program, then depending on the number of bugs found by other users, maybe, just maybe they would spend some of the alloted time to fix a few of the 3D surface/waterfall bugs too. . . 😉

Tim, I will do that as I go along and (re)discover these bugs/features that I was eluding to. I appreciate you monitoring this thread. 

[LrAssyCtlEng]

I have not tried to use the 'New 3D Surface' but, am trying to get an application from Version 8.6 to work in 2011sp1 using the NI_3dgraph.lvlib:3D Surface.vi. When I opened my project in 2011 and everything seemed to work properly I created my executable. My development computer is Vista Business SP2 and my target computer is XP Pro SP3. I had placed my executable on my target computer and got the 3001 error, but, would allow me to close the dialog and continue to the next process. Also after I closed the project it created the 3e.......dmp file. I then changed my connections to run my application on my development computer, everything worked fine from running the vi from LV2011. But, when I ran the executable on the development computer, got the same results when trying to update the graph, error 3001, but, the dialog box was different. I cannot upload more than 3 files, so, the development computer files can be posted later if needed. When I disable the update of the graph, I do not get the 3001 error on either system using the executable, but, when the app closes I get the dump file.

[QFang]

Hi, 

So I'm back with some observations:

I need to display absolute time on one axis (Y-axis). I could not get that to work via configuration and passing time-data values in, so after a suggestion on the forum here, I went  to use data value pairs.

Now, it seems that no matter how many or how few traces (data sets) actually exist, the y-axis always wants to display 11 values. My current work-around for that is to special handle cases where there are less than 11 traces of data by just duplicating entries in the data-value table. If I DONT do this, then it will display numbers for the elements I don't specify and also the positions will be off relative to the data.

Now, pan doesn't work. I read someplace that it works as long as you let go of the mouse still inside the surface area, this is not the case on my computer, as seen in the posted video.

Further, the 3D properties dialog does not work. I have seen it working, but only a couple of times.

The 3d Surfcae without pan is very annoying for the user, and bad handling of the y-axis labels is very annoying for me as the developer.

Other problems are that if you set cursor positions using property nodes (i.e. initial cursor position to the center of the surface or similar, or if you have a button to help the user single step from one trace to the next) does not trigger the "snap to" event (I use the term event in a general manner here, its not an event case that I have!) and the cursors are thus floating over the data.

Also note the ugly gray border around the 3D graph? Well, I can make the border transparent, but not the decoration on the color legend, so I opted for uniformly ugly rather than random ugly.

Lastly, I was tempted to upload the video compressed with WinRAR since that file is only 559kB vs zip file of 3000kB, but I wasn't sure if WinRAR is widely reckognized amongst people on this forum???