I am looking to animate a 3D character in WPF, imported from software like 3ds Max. I can import the character as a mesh, but animating it like a Skeleton doesn’t seem to be straightforward.
I’ve read a few other posts on here stating it’s not possible, but then I found a book on (ISBN 1847198929) that has a chapter on 3D Character animation in Silverlight (Silverlight being a subset of WPF this got my interested). This seems to contradict everything on the web I can find about animating 3D character in WPF.
Has anyone has experience of this in either Silverlight or WPF who can offer any advice? (I have of course ordered that book!)
Thanks,
Sliverlight doesn’t really have true 3d rather it used plane projections/translations, so its what is known as 2 1/2 D I think. So Silverlight will only be able to do things using planes, and skews. Its doesn’t support true meshes/geometries etc etc
As far as WPF goes, it’s a better story, you have a fairly rich sets of 3D APIs include many transform(s) which would allow you to manipulate your imported model, either directly or would certainly allow you to add the missing pieces (assuming your 3d Application didn’t export everything required into the XAML it creates) to the XAML which would then allow you to animate your 3d character.
For example here is how you might rotate a 3d object using XAML and a RotateTransform3D : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.media3d.rotatetransform3d
Also bear in mind that anything you can do in XAML can be done in code. In fact here are a few of my own/work collegues WPF 3D articles, that may help you:
My articles
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/24727/WPF-3D-Part-1-of-n
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/25227/WPF-3D-Part-2-of-n
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/48940/WPF-3D-graph
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/26835/Marsa-A-3D-approach-to-XML-read-data
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/35481/WPF-FlipTile-3D
Fredrik Bornanders articles
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/338671/WPF-3D-FlipPanel
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/49949/WPF-3D-Tab-Carousel
Hope these help