I would like to render a WPF window into my own buffer and add that to my render loop, render into my own scene, manipulate it, etc.
Is there a built-in way to capture a WPF window's underlying DirectX buffer/swapchain?
Possible but not easy.
There is two great articles I found when trying to achieve this both by Jeremiah Morrill.
A Critical Deep Dive into the WPF Rendering System
How to get access to WPF’s internal Direct3D guts
Jeremiah uses a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) written in C++ which hooks DirectX functions and exports initialise function in which C# calls.
This still does not stop you using Easyhook and doing it in C# instead of Jeremiahs way.
When doing this myself this was my flow:
Hook DirectX 9/10/11 (EndScene, Present)..
Callback in .NET domain
and marshal buffer data using PInvoke
Manipulate buffer return
manipulated buffer back to C++ library
Display the final image buffer to
screen i.e WPF...
My experience: there is a compromise on speed but I believe with optimisation could be viable solution.
Another Solution
You could EAT hook D3D11CreateDeviceAndSwapChain which is an export from d3d11.dll. This won't work since WPF uses DirectX 9 under the hood.
Update:
After reversing WPF over the weekend I found unmanaged wpfgfx.dll which contains milcore which is a wrapper around DirectX 9 still to this date. You can see this in the below diagram of WPF Architecture.
Inside the module wpfgfx.dll it contains MILCore DirectX wrapper. More about WPF Architecture
Related
I am receiving real time graphics data via:
void Data(ref UInt8[] buffer, UInt64 length);
How can I display this data in a Window in WinUI3 via C#?
The WritableBitmap class in UWP looks promising, but I haven't found a WinUI equivalent.
CanvasRenderTarget from the Win2D for WinUI3 library also sounds promising, but that library doesn't look stable yet.
Any ideas?
If Win2d is good enough for you that's the easy way. If you want lower level control at some point, you can use SharpDX or perhaps better, it's spiritual successor Vortice. They are DirectX wrappers that can output to the Xaml SwapChainPanel in WinUI. There is also TerraFX, another DirectX wrapper which uses non-standard, lower level C# without trying to match any C# conventions. It's the most difficult option, but it's available if you need a little bit more performance.
SharpDX is retired, but it's very stable, and has been in use for many years.
https://github.com/amerkoleci/Vortice.Windows
http://sharpdx.org/
https://github.com/terrafx/terrafx.interop.windows
All these are available as nuget packages as well.
I have written a DX11 renderer using c++. I am now looking for a way to implement an Editor/GUI for it.
Since im pretty used to Windows Forms and WPF C# Applications im thinking about putting my renderer inside a dll, load the dll from a c# application and use it to draw into a defined section of the form. Does this even work with a window handle passed by a managed c# appication and how is the performance if it does?
From my understanding, since the actual communication with the DX11 API would still be directly in c++ and the c# part would only tell the dll what to do the performance loss should be almost nothing. Or is this generally a bad idea and implementing the GUI directly in c++ using a library or D2D is the better approach.
In WPF you can use D3DImage which is just like a simple Image in your xaml. The general principle is as follows:
Allocate a Direct3D 9 texture, this will be your rendering target.
Hand it over to the D3DImage.SetBackBuffer.
Put your rendering code inside CompositionTarget.Rendering event handler.
RenderStuffToTexture();
d3dImage.Lock();
d3dImage.AddDirtyRect(new Int32Rect()
{
X = 0,
Y = 0,
Height = d3dImage.PixelHeight,
Width = d3dImage.PixelWidth
});
d3dImage.Unlock();
Since you are using Direct3D 11, you have to use DXGI surface sharing to share the D3D9 textute with D3D11. There are 2 examples I know of that illustrate how to do just that. Microsoft D3D11Image and D3DImageEx (my personal preference, can be found in multiple places online).
Regarding performance, once you use WPF you no longer doing the presentation yourself. You literally write a small render-to-texture logic inside a WPF D3D9-based renderer. So not everything can be controlled including presentation time. From my personal experience, you can definitly render simple scenes at a nice framerate. For a really graphics intensive app and strict FPS requirements I would use a more lightweight (and less intrusive) UI solution.
Note that you can also use WinformHost control to get a HWND and render to it. This has a serious disadvantage if you want to overlay UI controls over the rendered frame - AFAIK you simply can't.
I'm a complete beginner in C#, but I'm trying to write a very simple application in C# (VS2013) to simply view video stream or capture frames from a Sony FCB-EV7500 camera. The camera connects to a small USB3 board using CN401, and the board connects to the laptop via USB3. I can view video in VLC for example, but i'd like to write code in a C# application to get video/grab frames.
Google searching this brought me to DirectShow which apparently is only a C++ library. There used to be a DirectShow.NET wrapper available here: http://directshownet.sourceforge.net/about.html but it seems they haven't updated the project since 2010 and a lot of functions/interfaces at that time remained untested.
Are there any commonly used libraries for accomplishing this in C#? Perhaps something included in the .NET framework? Thanks for any advice or direction.
You really don't want to be marshaling full frame rate video into a C# application.
You should probably take a look at the .net bindings for gstreamer, I have personally only used the C and python bindings so YMMV. If that doesn't work you will need to:
Use direct show, gstreamer, or ffmpeg to deal with media.
Write a native wrapper around your media handling code.
Write C# code to interop with your wrapper.
depending on if you are using winforms or wpf you will either use a NativeWindow or D3DImageSource as your render target.
I have been working for quite a while on a simple graphics engine in C++ using Direct3d 11. I have decided to try and build a GUI just for fun, and after reading some on WPF, I really got fond of it. Thing is, i'm not sure if what I want to do is even possible.
What I would like to do is to load my engine DLL in a WPF application, and use the DX device inside a portion of the WPF window. Basically, what I want to do is similar to a map editor( where the main window has a bunch of controls and a child window that contains the render area - the device ), but instead of converting my engine to XNA, I'd like to use the already working C++ code with WPF. Is that possible?
Also, I have tried just for practice to create a window with Win32 and attach the device to it. It was a simple matter of just assigning the window HWND to the device upon device creation. I assume its the same with a WPF window, or am I wrong? Thank's for reading :)
Edit: Forgot to mention that I'm a complete novice with C#, but I do know you can import a C++ DLL and use its functions, I'm just no sure about the device - wpf window interaction.
WPF supports embedding D3D surfaces.
Start here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.interop.d3dimage.aspx
WPF mainly works with managed code. Managed code means most of the things are taken care by garbage collector. And as I can see from your post You want to integrate C++ dll which is unmanaged code. It is not so simple using C++ library in WPF but not impossible. C# provides many other aspects to handle these kind of scenarios.
You will have to take a look about Interoperability and unmanaged code.
Have a look on below link:
Sample Project
For the WPF/D3D11 interop, have a look at WPFDXInterop that was written by a Microsoft engineer. This allows you to have a D3D render target inside a WPF window, with proper interaction. There's a sample project at the link.
I want to create a simple 3D editor program, and I don't like C++ windows programming. But I don't want to mess with managed code when using OpenGL, either. So, it is possible to create in native C++ a control which will host the OpenGL 3D drawing surface, with no other controls, and also with an interface (methods and properties), and use it as a control in a WinForms, or even better, WPF application?
It is also possible to use managed C++. I created a simple OpenGL control for WinForms which suits your requirements. You can find more info about it here.
Does it have to be OpenGL? Consider using XNA which would let you use C# and DirectX. Otherwise I suggest you find a C# wrapper for OpenGL. There are two wrappers listed here http://www.opengl.org/resources/bindings/.
I dont really understand your intention. You said that you hate C++ programming, you dont want to mess with managed code when using OpenGL, you want opengl windows with no ui control but you want winform or wpf as you ui.
If you hate programming c++, you have to use managed code.
If you dont want to mess with managed code when using OpenGL, you have to use c++ programming.
if you want to create in native C++ a control which will host the OpenGL 3D drawing surface, with no other controls(which i assume UI controls), why consider winform or wpf?
Dont use WPF to create 3d heavy applications. wpf was meant as a ui. you will find a lot of limitation along the way. There is also limitation in hosting(WPF), which makes it useless to use opengl with wpf.
I think the best bet would be XNA or http://www.opentk.com/(if you must use OpenGL). Tao Framework is obsolete and is not worth the effort.
I suggest you look at Ogre 3D ( http://www.ogre3d.org ). This cross-platform C++ library covers Open GL as well as DirectX. It has been successfully embedded in Qt, MFC and even has .NET representation. I highly suggest you take a look at it.
All you have to do is create a wrapper in c++ that exposes functions in c#