by abenedik
2. April 2021 16:39
I would like to inform you that new versions of Ab3d.PowerToys and Ab3d.DXEngine have been published. The main purpose of the new versions is to solve some issues from the previous version. And as always, there are also a few interesting new features.
The first new feature that I would like to mention is that the new version of Ab3d.PowerToys supports creating contour lines (also known as isoline). The following image shows contour lines that were created from a height map:
The contour lines can also be added as part of a 3D plot - to demonstrate that, the existing 3D plot sample was updated to show contour lines:
Another bigger new feature is greatly improved support for creating 3D axes. The new axes can be used by many 3D plots and graphs. To support that 2 new classes were added to the Ab3d.PowerToys library. The first is AxisWith3DLabelsVisual3D that can show one axis and shows 3D text (axis title and value labels) by using TextBlockVisual3D objects. This shows text as real 3D objects. The other new class is the AxisWithOverlayLabelsVisual3D. As the name suggest this class is using standard 2D TextBlock elements that are added to an overlay Canvas object. The following image shows AxisWith3DLabelsVisual3D with a few different axis options:
To simplify showing multiple axes a third class - AxesBoxVisual3D - was added. It can show up to 6 axes. It also dynamically switched the visibility of the axes and orientation so that when user rotates the camera the correct axes are visible and the text is oriented in the correct direction.
So if you want to present your 3D data in some kind of a 3D plot of a 3D graph, you just got great new tools to achieve that quickly.
Let me quickly mention some other new features:
- Improved HeightMapVisual3D with a new option to use a one-dimensional texture for colors and then adjusting the texture coordinates of the mesh. This better interpolates the colors between various height map values. See updated sample for more info.
- Added Parent property to the BaseVisual3D object. This way you can easily traverse the hierarchy of objects that derive from BaseVisual3D object - all Visual3D objects from Ab3d.PowerToys, including ContentVisual3D.
- Improved Boolean operation that can now change only the triangles that intersect the second object.
But as mentioned before, most of the work was done to solve issues based on some new testing tools. A few fixes are related to using IsVisible property. The full list of changes can be seen in the Ab3d.PowerToys versions history page.
The Ab3d.DXEngine library did not get any bigger new features. But there were some solved issues. See the list of changes in the Ab3d.DXEngine versons history page.