Hi,

Does anyone know of a WPF 3D roadmap for .NET 4.0 and beyond? Will mesh morph animation, 3D primitives etc. be implemented?

regards,

Danny

We don't get specific about these things because it's hard to predict the future and we don't want to let people down :). If you could be more specific about what things you want from WPF 3D, that would be very helpful.

Our next release won't have any major new 3D features.

Hi Jordan,

Thanks for your response.

The most obvious request (and the minimum I was hoping for) is parity between the 2D and 3D APIs:

Shape3D, Path3D, MeshGeometryAnimation etc. Also a basic extensible 3D mouse tracker, pan, zoom.

Without these every developer has to reinvent the wheel (literally!) This is a great (and obvious) impediment to the adoption of 3D.

Of greater vision would be support for vertex shaders. This would be awesomely powerful.

When WPF 3D was released there was a flurry of excitement, and we were told that the large ommisions to the API were due to time constraints and would be rectified. As a stop gap the 3DTools source was published. The last check-in was over 2 YEARS ago. Little of this work has made it into the framework!

It is disappointing to hear that innovation has stopped in WPF 3D and that even 2D/3D parity is not on the roadmap.

I hope that Microsoft revisits its 3D strategy going forward and decides to invest heavily once again.

regards,

Danny

Seconded. It's a shame that there's so much power (and no doubt a lot of initial investment from the dev team responsible) in WPF 3D, which is likely going untapped by many developers for the simple fact that it can still be a real pain to set up a 3D scene quickly with decent mouse support etc. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but I've not found any inbuilt factory class in the framework that could knock out a cube, sphere, cone etc. Maybe some quick and easy way of creating a "default" scene with recommended dimensions and some basic lighting as well?

It's hard to want to really play with concepts when getting them off the ground is so difficult to begin with, which is a shame as I think WPF 3D has immense potential for proper LOB apps, not just games and silly GUI tricks.

I'll keep playing with WPF 3D (XBAP), up until Silverlight has a true hardware accelerated 3D capabilities and socket support not just the basic http bindings ;)).