3D Picture Control Overlay

[SoheylV]

Hello everyone,

I want to display some numeric indicators on top of a 3D picture, but it seems that the 3D picture always stays on top and blocks the indicators. Does anyone know of any workaround?

Cheers

[Hockeyjim07]

Hi SoheyIV,

Unfortunately this is not possible. Think of the front panel in terms of layers, each object existing on its own layer. When you re-order 2D objects they will switch layers as expected but 3D pictures and graphs will not do this. They are locked to the top layer. This would also cause a very bad preformance hit as the rendering would take a big hit if it had to draw 2D images ontop of the 3D images being displayed.

[550nm]

Hi Sohey,

I came across this post while looking for a "lightweight" solution to the same problem.

I actually implemented a solution to this problem by creating a subVI which was programmatically re-sized and positioned over another VI which showed video in a picturebox. The overlapping VI is transparent.  An XYgraph-control is placed on the over-lapping VI.  The background of the XYgraph is also transparent. Lines drawn on the graph appear over the (live} video.

Regarding performance, I did see occasional cpu-performance problems and suspected this logic was part of the problem.  The app was running on a 5-year-old old XP laptop. Just updating video was a strain.

Today I'm trying to accomplish the same thing by overlaying the video (picturebox) with another picturebox on the same VI FP (the subject of this thread).

Did you find a solution?

Cheers!

[Sil.VI]

 Hi 550nm,

I'm afraid to say that it is not possible yet to have several controls or indicators on the same place on the Front Panel, without getting into performance issues, especially if you are working with overlapping graphs, because LabVIEW must redraw the graph any time either of the indicator's value change.

[Intaris]

Can't you simply create annotations on the 3D graph containing the text you require?  Do you need them to be interactive (controls) or just informative (indicators)?

[550nm]

(not to hijack the thread, but...)

I need to draw cross-hairs, lines, circles and possibly other shapes.

I think the issue is that the topmost control must set its "transparent" pixels to the value of the picture/control behind it.  If the topmost control overlays a video updating at 10 hz, then the topmost control must perform a "paint" at 10 Hz too.

S.Jimenez, Hockey, please correct me if I am wrong!

Cheers!