Hi All,

I'm looking to render 3d scenes on a server, convert them to jpegs and serve them to the client browser but I'm unsure of the best approach. I'm not looking to do streaming animation, just the odd still image.

The project is to generate photo-realistic stills using a mixture of customer supplied image assets and 3d scenes using pre baked textures containing advanced lighting. So, its nothing too heavy or demanding and I don't require advanced lighting or shaders because of the use of pre baked textures.

My question/problem is how to do it? I'm familiar with c#, asp.net, web services etc, modelling tools (3d max, Lightwave) I've also used buggy old Managed DirectX in the past before MS ditched it and have dabbled with the 3d fundamentals back in my Uni days. Just for a bit of background.

Question 1, is it possible to get DirectX without hardware acceleration running through a web service/NT service or library attached to an ASP.Net page?

Question 2, assuming the answer to 1 is yes, then which technology would you reccomend, XNA, DirectX, SlimDX or something else?

Also, I'd prefer to stay with c# rather than C++ if possible.

I would very much appreciate any hints, tips, ideas, comments and examples from all you experts :-)

Thanks in advance,

Bob.

I dont have so much knowlege in networking, but one thing is sure - anything is possible. You can just send each pixel in some kind of array. The problem, as I see it, it will take forever to send all the images, it's probably faster to let the client render the scene.

I think DirectX always needs access to the UI, but the final post in this thread seems to indicate that they managed to get it working as a service.

If getting the same perf as hardware is not a requirement, then you should be able to use WARP in a service.

Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285359.aspx

Fantastic, I had no idea that existed, that looks like it should do the trick....

"WARP allows fast rendering in a variety of situations where hardware implementations are unavailable, including

• ...
• When running as a service or in a server environment"

I'm liking the sound of this already.

Cheers John.

verymadbob, did you find a solution to this? I'm also interested in server-side rendering of XNA scenes to produce dynamic thumbnail images. I'm trying to figure out if a server can fire-up an XNA game, render a scene to an image and send that image back down to the client, all without a high-end GPU installed on the server.
 
John K.