Hi community, i am new to this forum but i have searched a lot of things in this forum and i have some questions where i would like some guidance. First of all, i have developed an utility for civil engineers called: Secciones (http://secciones.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/que-es-secciones/) that allows to calculate cross-section properties like Area, Inertia Moments, etc. That program was developed with VS2005 using Winforms and the external Library ZedGraph for the visualization of graphics in 2D. ZedGraph is nice, it has some built-in functionality like panning, zoom with the mouse, but now i would like to see my cross-section in 3D (by extruding the 2d cross-section) with some perspective and the ability to have panning, zooming, rotating. So, i have these questions:

• At beginning i choose Tao Framework, but doing some research i have found OpenTK that looks interesting and provides some high functionality i would use. My question is: How is OpenTk related with Tao Framework? what is the relation among them?. Does OpenTk depends on it?
• My application need to show graphics inside the form (not the whole form area). I mean showing graphics in a graphic control that is inside my form. Is that possible? (please see the attached image of my program)
• I need to allow the user to interact with the graphics for panning, zooming, rotating and select objects like points or lines. Is that possible?, are there any examples?
• Is there a way to capture the graphic and put it in a report (using the printpreview control)?
• I have found an interesting library called ILNumerics.Net, what is the relation with OpenTk?. Should i use it instead of OpenTk for my purposes? (some clarification will help me a lot!!)

I am really interested on using OpenTk but i need some answers and guidance. Thanks.

Quote:Original post by eriveraa
At beginning i choose Tao Framework, but doing some research i have found OpenTK that looks interesting and provides some high functionality i would use. My question is: How is OpenTk related with Tao Framework? what is the relation among them?. Does OpenTk depends on it?

OpenTK and Tao both provide bindings to OpenGL. OpenTK provides more high-level functionality, such as window creation and such, as well as providing more "dotnet friendly" names for OpenGL functions. For instance, in Tao to call glReadPixels you would write "Gl.glReadPixels" and in OpenTK you would write GL.ReadPixels.

Quote:Original post by eriveraa
My application need to show graphics inside the form (not the whole form area). I mean showing graphics in a graphic control that is inside my form. Is that possible? (please see the attached image of my program)

Yes, OpenTK includes a GLControl you can drop into a form to render into.

Quote:Original post by eriveraaI need to allow the user to interact with the graphics for panning, zooming, rotating and select objects like points or lines. Is that possible?, are there any examples?

The GLControl has mouse events and such, like any other windows forms control. As far as selecting objects with the mouse pointer, that is an OpenGL issue. Google "OpenGL picking" for tutorials on how to do that.

Quote:Is there a way to capture the graphic and put it in a report (using the printpreview control)?

Yes, I think you could get away with just calling glReadPixels after the scene is rendered, and then put the pixel data into a bitmap.

Quote:I have found an interesting library called ILNumerics.Net, what is the relation with OpenTk?. Should i use it instead of OpenTk for my purposes? (some clarification will help me a lot!!)

OpenTK doesn't contain most of the numerical stuff that ILNumerics has, like the Lapack wrappers. ILNumerics looks like it has support for plotting, is that what you are referring to? I'd imagine the plotting controls in ILNumerics are much higher level than what you get with OpenTK, so if those controls satisfy your needs, they'd be easier to use, but if they didn't satisfy your needs, then you might be hosed.

Btw, there are forums on http://www.opentk.com so for OpenTK specific questions, that might be the best place to ask.

Any more ideas or comments?
TIA