WPF 3D Dynamic Textures

Question

I am writing a program (c# .NET 4.0 WPF 3D) that renders earth slices (like OpendTect's or Petrel's seismics module).

The problem is that I need to be able to zoom in deeply, and still see the details.

I tried putting a huge detailed texture (5000x5000), but it eats too much memory (200-300 MB), and crashes when I try to increase the size.

Now I want to see if there is any way of using something like a dynamic texture - the one that will change depending on distance to the camera.

Or maybe there is some other way of dealing with high-resolution surfaces?

I use this code to load texture:

wbm = new WriteableBitmap(
(int)1306*scale,
(int)ns*scale,
96,
96,
PixelFormats.Indexed8,
new BitmapPalette(getColors()));

...

visual3d.Material = visual3d.BackMaterial
= new DiffuseMaterial(new ImageBrush(wbm));

Answer 1

You have several options here:

• Optimize current solution. 5000 * 5000 * 4 is around 100 MB. How do you load and show the texture? I have an app that renders up to 1100 3d objects and uses 300MB of memory and the performance is good enough. I strongly advice you to run a profiler, not only for pure performance reasons, but it helps to catch bugs! I my WPF 3D, thanks to the profiler I found that I was doing useless tessellation.
• Create one low resolution image of whole texture and a few small high resolution images which are parts of the texture. If the user clicks/zooms-in you will load small high resolution image that will fit viewport. Similar effect to google maps.
• Use XNA. You can host XNA inside WPF and use DXT texture. I'm not sure, but WPF doesn't support that texture formant directly.