WPF 3D and Helix 3D toolkit graphics with ~500,000 triangles in one viewport- optimizing

Question

I am new to stack overflow and new to 3D graphics programming. I have been given the task of creating an app that will read in data (currently I am reading from a delimited text file, but eventually will read from data arrays) and to graphically display the data in 3D. The data is x,y,z coordinates read from a 3D scanner which is scanning logs. I need to show the 3D representation of these logs on screen, from 4 different angles. I am reading the data into a 2-dimensional Point3D array and then using it to create 3D models in a HelixViewport3D. I use a nested for loop to check that the data points in the array are within certain x,Z bounds- and if they are I need to create a triangle out of that data. Once the entire array is passed through, I add the Model3DGroup to the children of my viewport:

topModel.Content = topGroup;
this.mainViewport.Children.Add(topModel);

It takes about 8 seconds for this to take place and zooming,panning, rotating are very very slow with all this data on the screen (around 500,000 triangles). Are there any ways to improve performance of WPF 3D graphics? I actually don't need to be able to zoom/pan/rotate in the finished app but it is helpful for debugging. The final app will simply be the same model shown statically 4 different ways, from different sides. However, I need to be able to read in the data and get the graphics to display in 1-5 seconds. Any help is greatly appreciated, and I hope my question is fairly clear!

EDIT: After doing some more digging into vertex buffering, this is what I need to do. I am using way too many points. If anyone can point me to some literature on doing vertex/index buffering in c#, it would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I have solved this issue. Thanks for the input Capt Skyhawk! You saying that you doubted this was a WPF3D shortcoming helped me look in the right places. My problem was that the way I wrote this made every triangle it's own ModelVisual3D!! I re-wrote the code to contain only 3 GeometryModel3D (sp?) objects, and all the triangles are placed in a MeshGeometry3D and then the mesh is used to create a model. This made the models render in < 0.1 seconds. I now have a new issue- for some reason only about half of the triangles are showing up in the model in my viewports. I'm not sure why, though it may be that I have too many Point3D points or too many triangle indices in my mesh.

Answer 2

I doubt this is a shortcoming in WPF3D. It's more than likely the loading process. Parsing a text file with 500,000 triangles(even more points!) is where the bulk of the processing time is being spent.

If the loading of the text file is not being included in the 8 seconds, something is very wrong.

Are you using index buffers? If not, you're shooting yourself in the foot with that many vertices.