I'm building an application and I'd like its User Interface to be 3D, most probably a cylinder. The user would see the cylinder[Horizontally laid] and the cylinder's curved surface would have the buttons and any other controls that need to be placed. The cylinder needs to rotate and later, I'd like to add some other effects to the cylinder too.

Someone told me that such a UI can be modelled using Maya or Blender and exported to openGL and then I could use C/C++ (with Qt) to carry out the actions. How can this be done??

Is there any other way to build the UI and do all the other things that I need ?? I really need some help because I have the UI in mind, but no idea on how to implement it.

Thanks