• The out of band 3DTools library from members of the WPF 3D team includes "ScreenSpaceLines" which allows for wireframe rendering of lines.

http://www.codeplex.com/3DTools

•  Charles Petzold has also posted about wireframe rendering with his own implementation.

http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2007/08/310158.html

If you are interested in the core patterns of this method of testing, check out this video!

The Alpha Release covers:
TestApi v.0.1 provides the following APIs:

• Visual Verification
• Input Injection
• UI Automation Helpers
• WPF Dispatcher Helpers
• Command-Line Parser

The ZIP package contains:

• Binaries
• Documentation (conceptual documents and API documentation)
• Source Code
• Samples
  

1. Xaml Exporter for Blender
2. Zam3D Modeller
3. Maya to XAML converter
4. Viewer 3DS 3DS to XAML Converter
5. OBJ to XAML support in Expression Blend (Mini Cube Walkthrough)

In addition, there are a number of libraries for generating 3D primitive content such as planes, spheres, cubes, etc in circulation on various community sites. Creating a 3D content library is a good way to test your knowledge of 3D, but if re-inventing the wheel isn't your thing, Charles Petzold has scoped out some quality content in this space:

1. MSDN 3D Text Tutorial
2. Petzold.Media3D library complementing his WPF 3D book

I would recommend getting conversant with using both modelling tools and generating content via code. Some cursory considerations to ponder when considering how to represent 3D content:

• Ease of Representation - If you want to represent a bunch of cubes/spheres with different textures in each case, you'd probably be crazy to try create and texture those separately in a modelling tool. Likewise, representing shapes from the naturual world, like animals, from primitive 3D shapes could quickly get to be painful.
• Binary/Data file size - For instance, a high resolution sphere can be represented on disk much more cheaply with the algorithm, than the corresponding mesh.
• Load time - Trade-off of disk time vs potentially non-trivial generating algorithms
• Texturing - Which approach allows you to texture your content satisfactorily - Can you represent multiple material "layers" in an effective way, do you want to utilize techniques such as level of detail rendering, etc... Specialized 3D tools are targeted to the work of "skinnning" the texture coordinates complex models.
• Flexibility - For instance, if you want to do techniques such as "Level of Detail" rendering, a generated content approach can provide you more flexibility than modelled content. Modellers/Artists *love* it when you ask them to turn their 300k poly masterpiece into 80 triangles. This usually translates to running mesh simplification tools on existing models, or just hack out some workflow tool to perform that work in batches, followed by some fine tuning at the end. In this context, generating the appropriate mesh complexity at run time is preferable to at design time.

I'm happy to hear from customers working on their WPF apps! Let me know if you have any questions, feedback or comments. Thanks!

Viewport3D in XBAP

Rendering 3D Studio Models With WPF

Storyboard/Input based animation

All his WPF articles are posted at this location.

In addition theWPFBlog has shared a 3D carousel sample.

1. A "KeepCaseUIElement3D", a representation of a real world DVD case, with the added twist of playing video on the inside. It's API consumes Uri's for cover images and a media source, rather than traditional models, meshes, and materials in 3D .
2. A "MovieCarousel" - a simple 3D carousel layout control which re-orients itself to position the object which was last clicked towards the user.

You will need to operate with the WPF V3.5(Orcas) Beta 2 Bits. You can get the Visual Studio Orcas Beta 2 installation with WPF from here.

Concepts you can see in practice with this sample include:

• Creating interactive 3D controls as interactive containers on non-interactive 3D models (Hint - Leverage existing 3D Xaml with little effort)
• Creating a Custom Visual3D container type
• Use of StaticResources from Application.Resources to separate mesh details from overall structure
• Databinding a mesh texture to consume a local DP exposed as a URI, via a data binding type converter
• 3D Layout - Cylinder Layout Helper class
• Playing Video as a material on 3D

If you have any questions on the details of this sample, feel free to send me a message, or leave a relevant comment- odds are fair other folks have similar questions, which could make for interesting future blog postings!

 Thanks!

VideoNavigator3D.zip

Attached is the sample application(Requires V3.5 to run), and the essential core source code, which can be placed in a new WPF project, in conjunction with a set of suitable textures. It is built to run on WPF V3.5 as it incorporates the new ContainerUIElement3D type, to allow for interactivity over the 3D content such as ModelVisual3D objects. This provides a good opportunity to get a practical understanding of WPF's Material types(described in detail on the post linked here).

This scene was built from a set of 5 images:

• Cloud map image with alpha channel or a Cloud Opacity map applied onto the OpacityMask
• Earth daytime map
• Earth nighttime map
• Earth Specular map

The Geometry as you may expect was composed of a pair of spheres centered on the same point. The inner sphere model is used for the earth's surface, and has:

• A daytime map applied on a diffuse material. This image is set to full opacity, so no blending of objects behind it will occur, and it will be softly illuminated by external lighting.
• The nighttime map is applied on an emissive material. This material has an additive effect where it is rendered, with lighting having no impact(emissive materials render at full intensity). To cut the lighting out of the daytime surface, a moving OpacityMask can be applied.
• A map of the earth's watery, reflective surfaces applied using a specular material. Specular materials, like emissive materials have an additive rendering effect, providing bright highlights on the ocean surfaces, while having no contribution over land.

The Cloud Model uses the same geometry as the earth, with a minor scale transform applied to make the clouds slightly extend beyond the radius of the earth. The clouds are rendered as a Diffuse Material, with the clouds applied. When used with the opacity mask, this produces a mixed effect of fully obscured cloud regions and fully transparent areas. This effect could be carried further with a series of low opacity, blueish diffuse materials to represent the Earth's atmosphere.

Finally, I placed these two models within a ContainerUIElement3D, applied an animated Rotation Transform to represent the Earth's daily spin. You may have heard - with UIElement behavior on 3D, we can now easily develop 3D UI behaviors, without worrying about hit testing and eventing plumbing. Here, I connected mouse event handlers from XAML and prepared corresponding 3D behavior in response to the events.

3D Earth Demo w-Source.zip

Demo and source is available at this post.