Sharp3D – The Beginning

Back when I was on holidays, I’ve read a post by Maciej Aniserowicz about the “Daj się poznać” contest. The aim of the contest is to write an open source project of any kind in any technology, and blog about it at least twice a week, for ten weeks period. There’s also pretty nice collection of software to win. And because a crazy idea is floating in my head for a while, I thought – why don’t give it a try?

So what am I going to create? I’m going to build a research application for manipulating 3D objects, perhaps with the ability to define materials for them, modify existing objects, add new objects to the scene, and render them using custom crafted raytracing algorithm. As if this were not enough, application will fully support multi-touch displays.

Currently, I have a basic skeleton of the application, with my own scene objects (I want to abstract from WPF elements). Here’s the screenshot from the initial drop.

Motivation

There are a couple of reasons I’m writing this project. By no means, the most important thing for me is to learn strong basics of 3D programming. Triangles, tessellation, normals, materials, lightning, raytracing and more – there is a whole bunch of 3D stuff to master. I also want to learn this in context of WPF 3D – hope this will help me in building better looking apps in the future. I also want to see if the WPF 3D is suitable for project which does more than displaying 3D cubes with buttons on the sides. And last but not least – 3D programming is fun!

Goals

I want Sharp3D to be an extensible foundation for writing 3D applications by others. Thus, the main goal is the extensibility and component design. The application will span several components which can be used in standalone manner – this will support others in developing their own 3D applications! I want to provide many ways of interacting with the 3D model. So besides the standard mouse and keyboard, I will utilize multi-touch capabilities of today’s monitors, and the Wiimote. Because editing capabilities, if any, will be very limited, an important part is to write a loader which will take existing scene and import it to the program. I plan to implement 3ds file importer, because this is de facto the standard in the 3D industry – all known modeling applications support it. Having that, another cool feature will be XAML exporter.

Tools

Because this is a research project, I’m going to use the latest and greatest tools available J This includes:

· .NET Framework 4.0

· Visual Studio 2010

· WPF 4.0

· Blend 4.0

· Git

· Multi-touch / Wiimote

Sources

I decided to use Git which is a fast, distributed version control system. The distributed means that the code repository lives not only on the server (which by the way is not a requirement) but on the user’s computer. This allows committing changes locally, and then pushing them back to the server. When using Git, the natural choice for open source repository is GitHub. The Sharp3D sources can be found at http://github.com/pwlodek/Sharp3D.

There are two important branches. The most important is the master branch. It will contain, latest, stable version. The development will be done on the dev branch. Besides, I will try to use the branch-per-feature approach, which I presume is self-explanatory. After I decide a feature is complete, it will be merged into dev branch, and then into master.

Contribution

If you are interested in contributing to the project – you are more than welcome! Just drop me an email so we can discuss the details. To begin your contribution, register on GitHub and fork the main repo and work on your part. Once ready, issue a pull request – and I will do the rest ;) The one thing is that I won’t pull till the end of the contest as the participants are supposed to work on their own.