Just need a quick overview

Hi there,

I'm just starting with WPF and am wanting to work on animating a 3D avatar with morph targets probably. At this stage I am not even sure if WPF is the way to go, but it looks interesting. Previously I have been working on a 2D system that switches frames around to get an animation, but it's a bit limited so I am looking at 3D.

Basically my avatar with be a human head or similar and I would want to animate mouth movements, eyes and things like blinks/smiles. I have the head already built and all the morph targets too.

So my question is, do you think WPF + Helix 3D is going to be worth attempting for my project idea please ?

I see some of your documentation is still in progress. How busy is the project ? I only ask as I fear I may have a lot of questions !

Also in my mind I have an idea forming on a simple morph target system (read that as I found some tutorials and am now ahead of myself!) so I would need to manipulate individual points on a model. This sounds interesting to me to at least try and learn something as I do not know much about coding for 3D manipulation.

Does Helix turn say an .OBJ model into XAML ? How would you control the points/vertices and so on are just a couple of the questions in my mind.

Anyway I have rambled enough, I'd appreciate any of your experienced thoughts on this. Many thanks for your time :)

P.S. on Stackoverflow is where I heard of you...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3127753/displaying-3d-models-in-wpf

One of the people there mentioned a tool called 'Deep Exploration' - but I have not been able to find it anywhere on Google, do you happen to know anything about it ?

Thanks !

1. Yes, I think you should try WPF3D first, then consider DirectX if performance is not good enough or you need more control over the gpu (shaders, physics etc).
   I like WPF3D because it is so simple and well integrated with WPF, and performance is good enough for most of my needs.
2. Documentation is high priority, but I don't have any available time to write it myself at the moment...
3. Yes, this library can read most .obj models and create standard WPF GeometryModel3D objects. You can modify the vertices of the MeshGeometry3D after the model has been loaded
4. I recommend stackoverflow for general WPF 3D questions, and this forum only for questions about the toolkit. stackoverflow also contains a lot of questions related to this toolkit too, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/helix-3d-toolkit?sort=newest
5. Sorry I don't know anything about Deep Exploration (but google shows: SAP Visual Enterprise Author (formerly Deep Exploration from Right Hemisphere))

I just wanted to say thanks for your reply and that it helps me a lot. I’ll try 3D in WPF and see how it goes. Whatever happens it seems like a good way to learn how to use 3D.

I've had a play with a couple of the demos in Visual Studio 2013. I noticed some did not work, but that could well be me at fault. The two I was really interested in work fine.