Foundation Silverlight 3 Animation- P11: Silverlight has really come a long way since I started using it. It’s kind of interesting to look back a mere two years (roughly) and think about how the workflow has changed. Of even more interest is the staggering speed at which new features are being added. In the time I’ve been using Silverlight, it has grown from a somewhat limited toolset to an ever-more-impressive technology that has really started to come into its own. | Chapter 7 SIMULATING 3D IN 2D In this chapter we re going to take a look at a couple of different methods for getting 3D effects in Silverlight. The first method is utilizing the plane projection transforms that are new to Silverlight 3. Plane projections will allow us to create some interesting planar 3D effects very quickly and easily. From there we re going to apply some of the concepts from Chapter 6 to emulate 3D object rotations. While Silverlight doesn t yet support full 3D models you can add a little pop to your applications by implementing the concepts we ll talk about here. Projection plane Even though we ve had our noses in the code for a little while now we re going to start talking about projection planes in the context of Blend. Why Because Blend just makes it really easy to access the features with which we want to work. I touched on the projection transforms very briefly earlier in this book. The projections are available on the Transform pane of the Properties panel which is shown in Figure 7-1. 281 CHAPTER 7 Figure 7-1. The Projection transform pane When the controls on the Projection portion of the pane are adjusted an object s rotation center point and offsets can be adjusted or animated. Rotations occur along the x y or z axis which will allow you to spin an object as illustrated in Figure 7-2. Figure 7-2. Projection rotations The second tab on the pane allows you to define the center of rotation. As with the regular center point transform values here range from 0 to 1 with .5 being in the center as shown in Figure 7-3. 282 SIMULATING 3D IN 2D The z center of rotation is likely to go unused for the time being but would be useful in the case of a true 3D model. Figure 7-3. Projection rotation offsets The third and fourth tabs allow you to adjust global or local coordinate offsets for your planar rotations. This is basically the equivalent of defining a radius offset for the rotation of the plane. With a basic understanding of the concepts .
