How to display a thumbnail of a custom file in Windows?

Background . I have developed an application (C # / WPF) that can read and display some 3D files.

I would like to know how to display an actual 3D thumbnail in Windows (7) Explorer:

The information I've found so far is messy and inconclusive.

Some posts here point to Windows API Code Pack

for this task, but I haven't found a single example of how to do it. Others suggest working with Shell Extension

. I guess these thumbnails are stored in a Thumbs.db

file inside some folders, it would be ideal to be able to modify it to include my own thumbnails.

This post explains how to create a thumbnail of an Office document using C ++ or Visual Basic. I'm not sure if this is what I want and I don't really understand how this sketch generation works.

Any suggestion or suggestion is greatly appreciated.