I have a few 3D meshes in my WPF application, and I need to add some animations to them, not the typical animations, but rather a sequence of PNG images for creating a graphical animation.
Think of it like I need to add a cartoon animation to the side of a Cube.
I know very well about the Viewport2DVisual3D, but when I replace my normal ModelVisual3D with a Viewport2DVisual3D, I get horrible performance! Around the 5 FPS mark.
As soon as I remove the material with IsVisualHostMaterial set to true, the frame rate is restored to a normal state.
Performance is always a tricky subject, but what I was thinking was creating a Visual Brush with an image source of a WriteableBitmap or RenderTargetBitmap and then draw my PNG's to that sequence.
Does this sound OK, or should I not be getting the poor performance that I'm getting?
Actually, come to think of it, have you tried using this?
<DiffuseMatrial>
<DiffuseMaterial.Brush>
<VisualBrush ...>
<VisualBrush.Visual>
...
I know that MILCore handles VisualBrush by rendering the backing Visual as a separate operation, so I wouldn't be surprised if it worked very efficiently with 3D.
Update
It also occurs to me you might try:
<DiffuseMaterial>
<DiffuseMaterial.Brush>
<DrawingBrush ...>
<DrawingBrush.Drawing>
<ImageDrawing ImageSource="{Binding ...} />
This would bypass the use of Visual entirely and possibly run much faster than Viewport2DVisual3D or VisualBrush.
I haven't yet had a need to dig deeply into WPF's 3D optimizations, but I know that Direct3D is capable of rendering using a writable buffer so if MILCore implements it correctly your idea of WritableBitmap or RenderTargetBitmap have a reasonable chance of working. Vista's Flip 3D is able to make this work with high performance using arbitrary applications (even GDI applications) and also uses a writable buffer.
If that doesn't work, another idea for you is to convert your animation into a video, either the traditional way or by creating a DirectShow stream from a sequence of BitmapFrames.
Hopefully someone else can come along and give you a better answer.
If your PNGs are representing a video stream, why not convert them to a video format at the outset? Creating an AVI from frames is easy. Horses for courses, as they say. It could be the PNG decoder slowing you down.
Related
I have this problem.
So I have a bunch of data that must be visualized on a canvas (say more than 5000 items). So I draw them as a bunch of vertical rectangles over a horizontal line, some thing like this:
---|--|||||---|---|||---||----|||||||--------
Now, because the canvas is small, I only draw a different amount of rectangles at different zoom level. So if I zoom in more, the line get longer, and more rectangles I can see.
Problem is every time I zoom in, I have to clear the whole canvas, and redaw everything with the new zoom scale. And it is really suck, the drawing is slow and scaling not really nice.
So I wondering is there a way I can achieve a faster drawing, and good zooming (like those vector graph, you can zoom in unlimited)??
Have you tried ScaleTransform Class?
<Canvas.RenderTransform>
<ScaleTransform ScaleX="2" ScaleY="2" />
</Canvas.RenderTransform>
See How to: Scale an Element too. For performance reasons:
Freeze your Freezables.
Update Rather than Replace a RenderTransform
You may be able to update a Transform rather than replacing it as the
value of a RenderTransform property. This is particularly true in
scenarios that involve animation. By updating an existing Transform,
you avoid initiating an unnecessary layout calculation.
Have you looked at the ZoomableCanvas? I haven't used it, but it looks like it's designed to do exactly what you want.
I'm trying to write an CAD-like application in WPF(.NET 4.0) that needs to be able to display a lot of 2D points/lines. It will be used to display CAD-plans of entire cities with zoom, pan, rotate and point snapping on mouseover.
Right now I purely use WPF. I read the objects from the CAD file draw them into a StreamGeometry, use it as stroke of a new Path and add it to a Canvas, with several transforms.
My problem is that this solution doesn't scale well enough. It works fine with small CAD-files, but when I want to display like half a city(with houses and land boundaries) it is very very delayed.
I also tried to convert my CAD-file to an image, but
- a resolution a 32000x32000 is sometimes not enough
- when zooming out the lines are too thin.
In the end I need to be able to place this on a Canvas(2D/3D) as background.
What are my best options here?
Thanks,
Niklas
wpf is not good for a large 3d models. im afraid it is too slow. Your best bet is direct 3d or openGL
However, even with the speed of direct3d,openGL you will still need to work out how to cull as many polygons/vertices as possible before the rendering of the scene if you are trying to show an entire city.
there is a large amount of information on this (generally under game development)
there are a few techniques including frustrum culling, near and far plane culling.
also, since you probably have a static scene you may be able to use binary spacial partitioning.
As I understand the subject is 2D CAD system within WPF.
Great! I use it...
OpenGL and DirectX are in infinite loop OnDraw always. The CPU works all the time.
WPF/Silverlight 2D is smart model.
Yes, total amount of elements (for example, primitives inherited from Shape) must be not so much. But how many?
I tested own app (Silverlight). WPF will be a bit faster I hope...
Here my 2D CAD results. Performance is still great. Each beam consists of multiple primitives.
Use a VirtualCanvas like this one from Chris Lovett.
I am developing a Maps like application using WPF. I have ~10,000 PathGeometry, Shapes added to the canvas. I have added ScaleTransform and TranslateTransform for zooming and panning controls.
The problem I'm facing is, when I zoom or pan, there is slight lag. Is there a way to organize the data so that I handle only the Shapes that are visible?
Any hints on making it more efficient will be helpful and appreciated.
What kind f stuff are you putting on the canvas? If using pathGeometry, are you enclosing them in Path class? If so, Path has FrameworkElement in its superclass hierarchy, which is responsible for massive performance loss.
Take a look at my question here. Although it is about Shape class, but the reason of performance degradation is the same, FrameworkElement.
If you are doing so, the solution is to use PathGeometry instead, and enclose it in DrawingContext of a DrawingVisual using DrawingContext.DrawGeometry() method.
Here are some links that should help.
Path Geometry
DrawingContext.DrawGeometry()
Optimizing Performance: 2D Graphics and Imaging
And draw the shapes yourself, using combination of lines, and other things provided by classes derived from Geometry class (ArcGeometry, PathGeometry etc).
This should help.
If you want the ultimate in performance for immediate drawing in WPF, then check out WriteableBitmapEx. This is an excellent open source library, which I recently contributed to. it provides GDI-like drawing capabilities on WriteableBitmap and is compatible with Windows Phone, WPF and Silverlight. The API is simple, you get blitting, polygons, lines and simple shapes etc... You won't get datatemplates and gradient brushes however.
I'm working on SEM image processing application, written in WPF. I have an image display control, derived from Canvas, which displays image & overlays using DrawingVisuals (one for each "layer"). It also implements Zoom & Pan using scale & translate transform, applied on DrawingVisuals.
When I zoom in the image to see individual pixels, they are displayed smooth, evidently using bilinear filtering to stretch the bitmap (no surprise, as WPF is rendered through Direct3D). However, for my use case, I would rather see individual pixels as sharp boxes, as usual in any image editor like Photoshop. That's why user of my app zooms the image -> to be able to operate on pixel level.
Is there such option in WPF (other than manually stretching the bitmap before displaying it)? I was not able to find anything.
thanks in advance,
Zbynek Vrastil
Czech Republic
Finally found an answer, with some help from Experts Exchange. Class RenderOptions defines attached property BitmapScalingMode, which can be set to NearestNeighbor. So,
RenderOptions.SetBitmapScalingMode(imageDisplay, BitmapScalingMode.NearestNeighbor);
does the trick.
Zbynek Vrastil
Hate to put a dampener on things, but if NearestNeighbor works like GDI+, then this will give you a limited success. As you increase magnification in areas of high contrast you might not get the desired results. In GDI+ you find blacks becoming blue, and whites becoming red - again I stress in areas of high contrast! If this isn't the case in WPF, think yourself lucky!
Perhaps a WCF developer could confirm that?
I've found that there are more options to consider, but I can only speak for the GDI+ Graphics class, which might be useful to someone.
Graphics graph = e.Graphics;
graph.InterpolationMode = InterpolationMode.NearestNeighbor;
graph.CompositingQuality = CompositingQuality.AssumeLinear;
graph.SmoothingMode = SmoothingMode.None;
This works for me. I think the SmoothingMode is the trick. Hope this helps someone else out there.
I've written a simple game-like app in WPF. The number of objects drawn is well within WPF capabilities - something like a few hundred ellipses and lines with simple fills. I have a DispatcherTimer to adjust the positions of the objects from time to time (1/60th of a second).
The code to compute the new positions can be quite intensive when there are lots of objects, and can fully load a processor. Whenever this occurs, WPF starts skipping frames, presumably trying to compensate for the "slowness" of my application.
What I would much rather happen is for all the frames to be drawn anyway, only slower. The dropped frames do not add any speed - because visual updates were pretty quick anyway.
Can I somehow force WPF to have my changes to the visuals be reflected on the screen regardless of whether WPF thinks it's a good idea?
Unfortunately I don't think there's anything you can do about this, although I will happily be corrected! WPF is designed to be an application creation framework, not a games library, so it priortises application performance and "usability" over framerate. This actually works very well when producing applications as it allows you to use quite rich animations and effects while maintaining perceived performance on lower end systems.
The only thing I think you might be able to try is push your movement code's Dispatcher priority down slightly to below Render (Loaded is the next one down) using something like:
this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Loaded, MoveMyStuff);
I don't have any kind of test harness to verify if that will help though.
This issue was fixed by using a Canvas with an OnRender override instead of creating and moving UIElements. This does mean that everything needs to be drawn by hand in OnRender, but it can now run at any FPS consistently, without skipping any frames.