Subject:
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Re: Question about Java3D
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev
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Date:
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Thu, 13 May 2004 00:50:21 GMT
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Viewed:
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1113 times
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Orion Pobursky wrote:
> I'm considering learning Java and the Java3D API. The only official distros for
> Java3D I can find are for Windows and Solaris. My question is does anyone know
> how portable the Java3D extension is? Dos anyone have any experience with
> Java3D in a platform other than the 2 listed above? I'm primarily concerned
> with the various flavors of Linux and Moc OS X.
>
>
Hi Orion.
I've been lurking here awhile and I've seen the stuff you've done for
LDraw. I'm glad I can finally
answer a question or two. While I do work for Sun, I don't work in the
group that does Java3D,
however I do know some of the developers.
As the page Don mailed out says, there are many ports of Java3D
available for several platforms.
The newest of these is the one you're interested in. It took a long time
for Sun and Apple to work
out the licensing for Java3D (and other Java API's) but there is finally
a Java3D implementation
for MacOS X (though it may only be for the latest version.)
Personally I did something similiar to what you're doing about a year or
two ago. I was just getting
into LDraw, and I was looking for some project to use to teach myself
Java, and I've always loved
computer graphics. I actually have written a .LDR file viewer in Java
and Java3D. It was alot of
fun. I haven't touched it in a while, but I do hope to try to turn it
into a full blown editor some time
soon. The .LDR file format fits very naturually with the Java3D
Scenegraph model. I was impressed
how quickly I was able to get the viewer up ant running.
At the time I was on a slower (no 3D hw) laptop, and on my solaris
Workstation. In the beginning
performance wasn't so hot on the laptop once you got to a model with
more than few bricks, but
I was able to easily restructure the program to fix that. The laptop
never really performed that great
(CAR.DAT was about as big as I would go on it.) but on the workstation,
or my new Dell laptop
with 3D HW, I see no performance problems at all, and there is *alot*
more geometry improvements
I've learned about since then that I still need to jump in and write up
some day.
All in all I like Java3D alot. Sun is starting to put more resources
into it again. As Don says, on most
platforms it is based on OpenGL (all platforms that I know of - Windows
gives a choice OGL or D3D)
If you want to do Java, but you want to pursue Don's suggestion of
straight OGL, there is a new
Java API being worked on by Sun (there may also be one outside of Sun.)
which basically exposes
the raw OGL API inside Java. I'm not sure what it's called but it may be
JOGL. There is talk of
re-implementing J3D on top of this new API.
There is alot of other new ideas for Java3D. It's been a while since the
last release, but Sun recently
announced it's intenetion to Open Source Java3D, and allow the Community
to directly contribute to it.
If you have any more questions, let me know.
-Kyle
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Question about Java3D
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| (...) Thanks for the insight Kyle. Here's my next question... I'm not looking to buy a Java IDE (I've already purchased Delphi and Visual Studio in the last year) so I went looking for a good, free IDE. I've found 2 that seem to be in wide use: (...) (20 years ago, 13-May-04, to lugnet.cad.dev)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Question about Java3D
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| I'm considering learning Java and the Java3D API. The only official distros for Java3D I can find are for Windows and Solaris. My question is does anyone know how portable the Java3D extension is? Dos anyone have any experience with Java3D in a (...) (20 years ago, 12-May-04, to lugnet.cad.dev)
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