This post has had some substantial edits as I continue to find solutions to some problems and come up with new ones, so hopefully it's still coherent. I was originally focusing on the DXEngine samples entirely and now am also looking through the PowerToys samples as well, which is helping a lot.
I'm currently evaluating 3d engines for an upcoming project and I had some questions I haven't been able to answer via search:
Does PowerToys come with DXEngine or are the products separate? The DXEngine sample project (seems to) rely pretty heavily on PowerToys and I wanted to understand DXEngine is a superset of PowerToys or I need both. Also related: in general (at least) it seems that PowerToys functionality/controls/classes are usable within DXEngine, is that correct? I definitely need DXEngine for (at least) model loading as the basis of my scene is going to be STL models with 3-50M triangles and I need reasonable performance.
Is there a way to do a global viewport transform? I found the FreeCamera sample in PowerToys and that seems a workable solution, though more work than I was hoping. Is there a better method? Is it possible to reorient ViewCube to match?
I need to interact with the model/mesh with the mouse, allowing the user to click, move and click again to select a "range". I found an example with Ab3d.Utilities.VisualEventSource3D.MouseMove/MouseUp, is that the best choice?
Is it possible to get the normal of the triangle/surface at a given point (i.e. from the mouse VisualEventSource3D.MouseMove)?
Can you give any guidance on if it would be reasonable/possible to be able to draw a polyline (or some similar feature) along a mesh, between two points? This is probably a stretch goal on the project, but the visual would be very helpful.
Thanks for any input/guidance
I'm currently evaluating 3d engines for an upcoming project and I had some questions I haven't been able to answer via search:
Does PowerToys come with DXEngine or are the products separate? The DXEngine sample project (seems to) rely pretty heavily on PowerToys and I wanted to understand DXEngine is a superset of PowerToys or I need both. Also related: in general (at least) it seems that PowerToys functionality/controls/classes are usable within DXEngine, is that correct? I definitely need DXEngine for (at least) model loading as the basis of my scene is going to be STL models with 3-50M triangles and I need reasonable performance.
Is there a way to do a global viewport transform? I found the FreeCamera sample in PowerToys and that seems a workable solution, though more work than I was hoping. Is there a better method? Is it possible to reorient ViewCube to match?
I need to interact with the model/mesh with the mouse, allowing the user to click, move and click again to select a "range". I found an example with Ab3d.Utilities.VisualEventSource3D.MouseMove/MouseUp, is that the best choice?
Is it possible to get the normal of the triangle/surface at a given point (i.e. from the mouse VisualEventSource3D.MouseMove)?
Can you give any guidance on if it would be reasonable/possible to be able to draw a polyline (or some similar feature) along a mesh, between two points? This is probably a stretch goal on the project, but the visual would be very helpful.
Thanks for any input/guidance