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This is part 7 of the series “Silverlight in Action”:

1. Visuals staring at the mouse cursor.
2. Floating Visual Elements.
3. Flipping Panels.
4. Flying objects against you.
5. Smoke effect
6. Book Folding effect using Pixel Shader.
7. Navigation in 3D world of 2D objects 
8. Animated navigation between Pages

Here we’re sharing our experience from the amazing CompletIT web site.

Introduction

It’s always complicated, when you have to deal with 3D objects. No matter what environment and framework you choose, you’ll need to learn a lot of complicated structures and procedures in order to implement even a simple scenario.

Windows Phone 7 (WP7) is the upcoming next generation Mobile Operating System by Microsoft. Amongst the many features, one of the nice features is that it has support for Silverlight. So most of the new features like 3-D, Databinding etc. are now available on WP7. In this article I will explain the basic Databinding as well as 3-D feature on Windows Phone 7. For development of WP7, you can use the VS 2010 Express 2010 for Windows Phone with the Windows Phone Developer Tools.

In pretty much any graphics system, transforms constitute the most important feature that doesn’t actually draw anything. Instead, transforms alter the appearance of visual objects by modifying coordinates with mathematical formulas generally expressed as a matrix multiplication.

I published a new demo video on how to create a light glossy 3D effect for a Silverlight 3 Textblock control with Expression Blend 3. Watch the step-by-step video at LawBot on Silverlight, my video channel on vimeo.com.

Perspective 3D Transforms were originally introduced in Silverlight 3, and allow 2D visual elements to be rotated in 3D space.[...] The problem in Silverlight 3 was that PlaneProjection’s were rendered using software instead of the video card (GPU), so you could quickly peg the CPU if you overused this transform effect.

I’ve created my list of favorites tools and libraries and posted them to the Downloads page on the Project Rosetta site. After posting the updated list yesterday I realized I missed two big ones: SilverSprite and Balder.

Breaking the new list down into categories, I ended up with 3 Essential, 4 Optional and 10 Specialty downloads.

The "Noise" can be used to make effects such as fire, water, marbles, smooth motion, hand-drawn UI, space travel effects, nebulas and a lot more!

Simplex noise has similar characteristics to Perlin noise - it's continuous, smooth and its first derivative is smooth too. The nice thing about the Simplex, is that its much easier to compute and thus can be implemented in Pixel shaders.

Silverlight has come a long way since its initial first release in 2007, but still real 3D is missing. In Silverlight 3 there has been done some work by Microsoft on the subject with the introduction of plane projection. For a simple cube like in this tutorial, one would be better off using that technique. But, if you want to represent more advanced geometries, the technique in this tutorial is better.

In this example I have used the InkPresenter to capture the mouse and produce vector paths. I also have a basic interface to change the colour and path size. I then use that captured data to duplicate the vector path upon 16 faces each rotating around a common point using the Projection properties.