3D Navball Options- Crossplatform?

[artwhaley]

So... I've been fiddling with building an external instrument suite application.  I started in Python, but just didn't find myself in love... so I'm back to wanting to do it in C#.    I'd classify myself as a dangerous novice in coding...  I'm learning a lot as I go.

The part I'm currently butting my head against is adding a navball.  I COULD do a simple PFD using 2D graphics...  but it seems so much more elegant to import a 3D sphere, import a base texture, draw the necessary markers on the texture, then apply it to the sphere and rotate the sphere to reflect pitch, roll, and yaw...  but...  I haven't done much 3D programming before.  Anyone have experience with a solution with decent tutorials that could get me up and running quickly on this task?  I'd LIKE to keep it cross platform capable, so WPF, Silverlight and similar solutions wouldn't be ideal.

It's overkill, but I'd honestly considered building the whole dumb app in Unity because I know it's easy to load a model and assign a rotation to it...  but that seems a little ridiculous when 90% of the app is putting text in textboxes and 2D graphics like drawing an orbit oval.   Anyone have thoughts?