How to make a 3D UI for an application ?

Question

I'm building an application and I'd like its User Interface to be 3D, most probably a cylinder. The user would see the cylinder[Horizontally laid] and the cylinder's curved surface would have the buttons and any other controls that need to be placed. The cylinder needs to rotate and later, I'd like to add some other effects to the cylinder too.

Someone told me that such a UI can be modelled using Maya or Blender and exported to openGL and then I could use C/C++ (with Qt) to carry out the actions. How can this be done??

Is there any other way to build the UI and do all the other things that I need ?? I really need some help because I have the UI in mind, but no idea on how to implement it.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can do this with WPF, it's pretty cool.

There is a whole section on skinning 3D objects with WPF UI's in this book if you can get hold of it.

Amazon

Answer 2

You can render your UI into an offscreen buffer (render to texture). Then, just map the cylinder with that texture.

I like using Crazy Eddie's GUI for my opengl UI but any UI system should work.

I just realized that you might be talking about actually using 3D models for the buttons and other controls. If that's the case, the above solution isn't going to work. I wouldn't bother trying to force a gui framework to handle this, I'd just create a custom solution specifically for this.