Load 3d scene into Silverlight

Question

To cut the long story short:

Is it possible to load a .vrml into Silverlight and render the 3d scene?

Now some more background information why I want to do this. I'd like to implement the following setup:

1. Do some long-running calculations on the server
2. Render some 3d-scene with mayavi
3. export it as a .vrml file.
4. Transfer it to a Silverlight-Client
5. Render the 3d-scene within Silverlight
6. Let the user interact with this scene, i.e., zoom, pan, rotate, ...

I expected it to be easy as recent versions of Silverlight come with XNA, but my research, both on Google and SO didn't give me any useful hints. It would be great if anybody could point me into the right direction, any links to tutorials, libraries or code snippets would be greatly appreciated.

As alternative file formats I could also produce, according to the mayavi-documentation

• rib (renderman)
• oogl (geomview)
• iv (OpenInventor)
• obj (wavefront)

Answer 1

You could give the Babylon Toolkit a shot (which was designed specifically for Silverlight 5 to demonstrate its 3D capabilities) as it has built-in Wavefront OBJ import. I can't comment specifically as to how well it imports as I haven't used it specifically.

Answer 2

This looks promising:

http://www.postvision.net/SilverMotion/Default.aspx

Straight from the web-site:

Simply put the SilverMotion component into the Silverlight development enviornment and import your .3DS file, exported directly from a 3D modelling environment (Blender, 3DS Max, Maya, MilkShape and etc.) into it. That's it. The scene will be rendered, ready to be interacted within your browser.

You may have to do an intermediate file conversion, but as for the display component, it sounds like a snap to use.