Visualizing 11,000+ points in space

Software: Away3D 4.x

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owntheweb, Jr. Member
Posted: 20 February 2012 07:54 PM   Total Posts: 32

Hello,
I started building a 3D sat sim a couple years back using Sandy3D that simulates satellites and other pieces of space junk orbiting the earth:
http://www.christopherstevens.cc/sat/

It’s a start, nowhere near finished though and I ran into so many walls.

...but then I discovered Away3D last week. WOW!

May I trouble someone for general feedback on the following items as I assimilate Away3D into my development regimen? smile

Q: How does Away3D handle rendering 11,000+ points at once? I got around to making this work previously by drawing single pixels thanks to the help of some ingenious people who made a star field class. At the moment I don’t see anything in related in the documentation, but maybe I can plot bigger things than one pixel with better performance?

Q: Is it possible to convert a 3D point into XY coordinates on the screen (I’ll start digging in the docs)? One challenge I had using Sandy3D for this is that XY points were being rendered even if the 3D point was behind the camera (I imagine there will be some experimentation with this).

Thanks for the feedback in advance. :D

   

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Fabrice Closier, Administrator
Posted: 20 February 2012 09:28 PM   Total Posts: 1265   [ # 1 ]

As we do not have primitive points, just triangles, you can do 2 things: use a single triangle, equilateral, and map it so that only its center has a point. or indeed project from 3 to 2d.
you can use the project method from camera for this or make a more efficient version of it, as you need to handle a massive amount of points…

   

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owntheweb, Jr. Member
Posted: 20 February 2012 10:16 PM   Total Posts: 32   [ # 2 ]

Fabrice,
I think you gave me great pointers to missing pieces in my mind. I’ll do some research and post something when I get things working.

Thanks much,

   
   

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