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i'm currently making some software to assist our experiments with writing 3d microstructures into glasschips using a femtosecond laser. It would be of great help to have a simulator for the structures before actually writing them. I'm sure there is some kind of framework for this already? The basic need is to plot 3d data, it would however be great if there is the possibility to zoom, drag and rotate the objects. All hints are highly appreciated! I will of course be happy to provide any additional information needed.

Cheers, Armin

user871784
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  • 3D in winforms? yeah sure... No winforms does not support 3D, you need WPF. – Federico Berasategui Sep 23 '13 at 01:01
  • ...thanks for the hint! That explains of course why i did not find anything in that direction...guess i will have to switch to WPF then... – user871784 Sep 23 '13 at 11:51
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    If you decide to switch to WPF, there is a great library called Helix3D which simplifies many things. Still, I have to warn you, the performance of WPF 3D is very far from perfect. We tried to use it in our application, but had to quit that way because of serious problems with performance on WPF side. If I were about to develop a serious 3D UI application using .NET I would probably go with WinForms + SharpDX/SlimDX. Requires a developer to know some details of 3D programming, but brings full control. – ezolotko Nov 12 '13 at 08:56
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    Thanks for your comment! We actually switched to WPF and started with Helix, which works quite well until now because the structures are not heavily complex. It is great to have a direction though in case things get more serious:) Thanks alot! – user871784 Nov 12 '13 at 10:53
  • You may refer to [MachineSimulation.DX](https://github.com/federicocoppa75/MachineSimulation.DX) – YantingChen May 12 '21 at 02:54

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You may want to look into the Tao Framework, which wraps OpenGL and other useful game-related functionality into a single framework. It's not very hard to use Tao with Winforms.

Jestin
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