Silverlight 3DSMax Exporter – Update
The exporter is coming along nicely. I’m really happy with the results. So much so that I decided to create a Q*Bert scene. Click on the image blow for the full sized image.
In the image you have 3DSMax in the background with all it’s wireframe goodness. The render on the right, and as you can see, the Silverlight output in Firefox on the left.
Features in the short term will be more .NET features, as full scene rotation would give fantastic interactivity, and open up the door for useful Silverlight transitions. Texture mapping is another one I want to look at, mainly focusing on texture scaling and offset.
Read MoreSilverlight 3DSMax Exporter
Silverlight 3 comes with the new shiny Projection and PlaneProjection for perspective 3D effects. One issue is to create rich 3D environments, you need a good toolset, and although Blend is a great tool, it’s not a 3D authoring environment.
Enter 3DSMax. 3D Studio has an awesome scripting capability in the form of MaxScript. Writing 3DSMAX exporters is a past time of mine, and having had a conduit to John Wainwright (aka Mr MaxScript) at that time I became very fond of 3DSMax and MaxScript. But here ends the history lesson.
The main aim of the Silverlight 3D Studio Max exporter is to create a pipeline for 3D authoring, through to Silverlight in browser, and convenient stops in between. It shouldn’t ignore or outcast Visual Studio or Blend (or Photoshop etc), and should not replace them. But where as Visual Studio is a coding environment, Blend an awesome behavioural and layout authoring environment, neither are good 3D authoring environments. The Silveright 3DSMax Exporter hopefully will fill that gap.
So first up, lets take the following image.
In the screenshot below I’ve taken the above image, applied it as a textures to planes (rectangles), replicated them helix/spiral paths in various directions, textured, translucent, with a blue environment background. This process took about 2 minutes.
You can see in the image above the front perspective wireframe, the render, and an angled perspective view showing the planes along the various paths.
But with a click of a button, this 2 minutes of work gets exported to XAML in a second. Alt tab to Blend (Visual Studio doesn’t like ImageBrush for some reason) and voila, instant 3D.
Note that the background is actually blue, but Blend doesn’t stretch it to the full view by default. A quick stop over in Visual Studio and every object is named and available in Intellisense.
And the real test, taking it to the the browser. Firing up Firefox gives us…
So in 2 steps, 1) Export, 2) Build, we have a 3D Studio scene in Firefox.
Currently in v0.001 pre alpha, but I thought I’d post some information about what I’ve been working on. But it truly is 1 click, 1 build. No smoke, no mirrors.
So what features does it currently have? For the time being I’m focusing on only 1 shape, being a rectangle. Simple shape rotation can be done in Blend. Max is for full scene creation. Shapes are the easy part, and the hard part is getting coordinate transformations, texturing, and full scene rotation. These are the real features that I’m currently working on, and I’ll let you all know when it’s ready to get your dirty mitts on. Stay tuned.
Read MoreMIX09 Day 3 – Silverlight, Virtual Earth, and Pigmaps
Day 3 of MIX09. I head to a few sessions, all of which are interesting.
Virtual Earth integration from Silverlight was the highlight. Once again a nice clean API allows developers to pick it up, with fully integrated customised maps in Silverlight developed faster than previously possible. Video and media asset integration, scaling/zooming/”deep zoomesque” capabilities, and the ability to feed in your own map data.
So how easy is it? Well, first up you need the control DLL. And once you’ve done that, you’ll need the following XAML…
<UserControl x:Class="MapControlInteractiveSdk.Tutorials.Tutorial1"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
xmlns:m="clr-namespace:Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl;
assembly=Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl">
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
<m:Map />
</Grid>
</UserControl>
BAM! Map with controls in Silverlight in 3 seconds. Even more impressive is all the small tweaks you can do in only a few lines of code. Chris Pendleton has a wrap up and other posts over at the Virtual Earth Evangelist’s Blog, so check out further details.
Another session I found interesting was Pigmap. All I could ascertain is that the translated meaning behind the brand could probably translate to ‘cash cow’, and although the presentation had a lot to be desired, the Korean markets tend to push online community concepts many years before the western world picks them up.
Pigmap will be a social networking site. It leverages Virtual Earth, flickr, and other services (OpenID, Live ID etc). To provide users with mapping, it searches Virtual Earth for certain locations and venues. So search for Las Vegas NV, and BAM, Las Vegas turns up on the map. But then type in ‘Venetian’ as a point of interest, and the platform searches Flickr for photos matching Venetian, grabs their geo coordinates, and drops thumbnails on the map (“The End of Theory” theory strikes again).
The questionable feature of the site is the ability to set “Missions” for people using the product. To be able to go “Dear X, I challenge you to go to this location” doesn’t really appeal to me, but “Dear X, you want to head here tonight?” might work, but many other services provide that functionality. Possibly Korea is too far ahead culturally with social networking that it zips over my head.
And that’s a wrap from MIX09. There is just so much more to talk about, and many of that will come with some of the posts that grow out of playing with the new toys. Head on over to the downloads page to grab your favourite preview/beta/CTP/SDK… and remember to check out the sessions at sessions.visitmix.com.
MIX oh-ten has been announced, and I’m excited to see where the designer and developer community has taken these tools by then.
Catch you online when I land back in Australia.
Deep Zoom Madi Gras
And on the front page of smh.com.au! Well, it won’t be now. Took me too long to decide to blog it… but here’s a screenshot!
The team over at Microsoft have laid down the gauntlet with a deep zoom collage of the photography going back to 1978! There are hundreds of photos, all easily filtered in realtime, and the experience is impressive. The entire application was developed in just 6 days, and is stored on the Windows Azure Storage Services.
Hurry! You can still check it out HERE. And for more information on how those delicate geniuseseses put it together, head over the Michael Kordahi‘s blog.
Read MoreSproutcore vs Silverlight vs Flash
The three way battle begins… or never start, ever. Apple is getting plenty of coverage recently on their love for Sproutcore, but I can’t see where the hype factor is really finding justifcation, other than the hype factory. A Javascript framework for MVC isn’t going to compete with the rich animation tools that Adobe already has, and the pipeline that Microsoft is reaching with Silverlight. Javascript is cool, but it is not a selling point. Sproutcore might have some shiny features out of the box, but true open standards are already being offered in many forms, including Google’s GWT. How one would do video streaming via Javascript starts to hurt my brain.
Javascript is an exteremely powerful language, and for products such as Sproutcore and Silverlight, it is a great thing. I questioned it in Silverlight initially, but came to love the Javascript support. Rather than being proprietary, it opens the door to so many more businesses who can not step into the realm of Flash due to lack of skills and toolsets within their delivery teams. With Silverlight 2 just around the corner, you will be able to take an array of languages that have excellent application building tools, even allowing Ruby could power your applications front and back, with Silverlight as the glue. These languages have a solid history, experienced developers, MVC frameworks, mature tools, and online communities.
Of course the main place Sproutcore is going to be exciting for Apple, adding ease of development, and more depth to browser applications, is on the iPhone. In general the current selection of iPhone applications are good. Not great, not cool, just good. But writing iPhone applications is cool. With the cool factor driving development and innovation, Sproutcore applications written for iPhone are likely targets for the Nokias and LGs in the market.
Could it be that the ultimate mobile combo a Silverlight RIA front end with a Sproutcore MVC driving it in the background? Only if banner advertising is brought to you by Flash.
Read MoreFlickr
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