How To Create 3D Data Visualizations With Viewport3D in C++
C++ Builder makes it easy to build engineering applications with custom data visualization methods. These kinds of applications are necessary to understand data results easily. You can use OpenGL or Direct3D libraries or similar 3rd party engines to create great-looking 3D visualizations which help users to make sense of complex datasets. With C++ Builder you can directly create your own 3D objects in your own C++ app by using TViewport3D. You can also animate them at runtime. In this post we will explain how to visualize 3D nodal data with colored cubes. Table of Contents Why are 3D data visualizations used? How to use Viewport3D for 3D data visualizations? How to use TCube for 3D data visualizations? How to code 3D data visualizations for a 3D grid object with cubes in C++? What does the C++ 3D visualization example look like? Is there a full Example of 3D data visualizations of a 3D Grid object with cubes in C++? Where can I find other C++ examples of 3D data visualizations? Why are 3D data visualizations used? 3D data visualization is important an important tool to help understand complex physical and statistical systems such as thermal distributions, fluid properties, pressure changes, and stress analysis of materials. How to use Viewport3D for 3D data visualizations? Viewport3D (TViewportd3D) component in C++ Builder FireMonkey projects is a great way to display many basic 3D Objects like Plane, Cube, Sphere, Cone, Plane, Ellipse3D etc. Please see this post about Working With 3D In Modern Windows C++ Development for examples on creating these 3D objects. You can also easily load your 3D objects into Viewport3D by using Model3D (TModel3D). To create a 3D object to be used in Viewport3D we need to use TMesh classes. TMesh is a custom 3D shape that can be customized by drawing 3D shapes. It is a class which publishes a set of properties from its ancestor, TCustomMesh, in order to let you design new 3D shapes at design time from within the IDE, through the Object Inspector. Use the Data property to specify the points, normals and textures for each point, and the order in which the resulting triangles are drawn. The designed shape is filled with the material specified through the MaterialSource property. If no material is specified, then the shape is filled with a red color. How to use TCube for 3D data visualizations? The TCube is used in the Viewport3D component of C++ Builder. It is a class that implements a 3D cube shape, built on a 3D wireframe, that can be placed with Viewport3D component or with a 3D FireMonkey form. We can use these cubes to visualize the magnitude of our data in XYZ Cartesian coordinates with colors. TCube is a 3D visual object that can be added from the Tool Palette in C++ Builder. To change the color or add texture to the cube, use the MaterialSource property. Set SubdivisionsDepth, SubdivisionsHeight and SubdivisionsWidth to specify how smooth the cube’s surfaces are. In this post we will use these cubes to display our 3D data (i.e. Temperatures in every nodes of a 3D Object). We can also use other 3D objects in C++ Builder. For example you can use TPlane (TPlane) forms in 3D to display surface distributions in a 3D view. For more details about 3D objects in C++ Builder, please read more about Learn To Quickly Create Specific 3D Objects In Modern C++ Applications For Windows How to code 3D data visualizations for […]
