Silverlight+Kit3D 3D Mesh Manipulation?

Question

I'm very new to 3D Graphics and Silverlight so this may be a ridiculous first endeavor but... I've been asked to determine how viable it is to produce an "avatar" creator which will be a part of a larger C#/ASP.NET website.

So far my plan is to use Kit3D to access the 3D capabilities of WPF and render a 3D model through Silverlight as a video brush (at least that's my understanding of Kit3D).

The 3D model will be created in something like Maya. It will be the basic human form which will be manipulated by changing parameters such as "height", "weight", and "skin color" on demand as the application runs. I think the only way to get the model from the modeling program into Kit3D is to export it as XAML, correct?

My main question is: How can I easily manipulate the model from the silverlight application? How would I change the model to be taller and thinner? Is this something defined in the modeling program that gets exported to XAML or can I only manipulate the raw verticies? If this is the case, how can I retrieve the part of the model that I'm interested in? For example, if I want to make the model tall I'd stretch the legs and torso in the y direction but I wouldn't want to stretch the face because that would look odd.

Links, advice, and even book references are appreciated. I have a general WPF book that I'll be reviewing so hopefully that will help with my second question.

Answer 1

I've done a lot more research and the answer is to define the different parts of the 3D model as separate meshes/geometries.

Then, in Kit3D you can load up each mesh's verticies into their own point collection and create a MeshGeometry3D for each one. Each MeshGeometry3D can be transformed independently of all the others which will produce the effect I was looking for.

Answer 2

hello!

How do i access and modify vertex data?

thanks