Quote Originally Posted by gcarreno View Post
I'm looking for a component that would take simple scene parameters, a 3D object (in whatever format) and accept a limited amount of inputs, mainly mouse grab to rotate and mouse wheel to zoom.

I remember that some of the game engines/frameworks, I've tested through the years, contained a demo with just this. Some of them would also add a bit of rotation to said object.
So basically you are looking for 3D model/scene viewer then.
Well most 3D graphical engines does support rendering to specific window (so you can render onto your panel for instance) but such rendering is not common as it might affect engine performance. But since you intend to only show single 3D model or more simpler scenes the performance drop won't be an issue. And making a 3D graphical engine into 3D model viewer isn't even so difficult as you only need to initialize the graphical engine, load the 3D model, and then apply proper rendering technique for the 3D model to be rendered nicely.
The only problem might be support for specific 3D model format as they are so many of them out there that you would probably have problem finding one graphical engine that could load all of them out of the box. So without us knowing in which format are your 3D scenes or models saved we can't provide you with any more specific suggestion of which graphical engine to use.