ok, thx  

Hoi!
I want to do some GPU programming, but am lacking some overview about the APIs there are. What is the best API? Some OpenGL? It should have a good documentation and Java would be finest :-)
What are your oppinions?
Thanks,
cweila2s

P.S.: I know this is hot topic! Don´t want to start a flame war   , just get some personal opponions what to use!

Why don't you try an applet like HelloUniverse and see wether the color cube is ok or not? It should show the basic colors.

P.S.: Greetings from Germany to Germany  

Shouldn't think so! You can hang everything you want in front of your view, text was just the example in my case. I didn't try any other, but that could even open the opportunity to create a 3d surrounding for your view (with rotating icons / displays that morph in real 3d and so on). Hmm, I wonder if picking works fine on these distances...?

Wrote an answer to this problem in its own thread...

Has anybody come to the idea just to hang a Text2D just in front of your ViewPlatform (maybe this is considered very basic, but it was my first approach then and it works )? Of course, you have to set FrontClippingDistance to aminimum, but it works fine. The question is, has anybody ever tried it out and can compare both regarding performance? I don't have an application complex enough to test it...

Hmmm, I tested it and it runs good with proper colors! Thus the problem doesn't  seem to be with Java3D! Do you have this occur with other applications too? When drawing a colored geometry?

I don't know which behavior the process scheduler in Windows XP uses, but why don't you try and give them a amount of time when sending them to bed -> wait(100). Sounds (haha) not very reasonable, but I'd be interested in the results.

Another thing is - why do you want to have one thread for each sound??? Of course the scheduler has to look after its threads, so why don't you make its work easier and give it only on thread at all? What about a thread-free solution? Depends on what kind of application you use that for, of course...

If I understand you right, even an uninitialized sound schedular take process time? That'd be very bad  

But you have to spend some time getting along with Blender. Most of the guys I know that worked with Blender cursed it a lot in the beginning for its quite unintuitive handling. Nevertheless I began to like it after a while...

Go for:

http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/

There's ImageJ, that can easily convert the JPGs into an avi. There are several other programm that can do this better (or directly to an mpeg2), but ImageJ is Java and stand-alone, thus no root rights or things like that (which may be interesting for some people, it was for me).
Plus, you can write your own converters or filters easily  

The key is to use one single target t3d and have all other transforms happen on it, like:

target.mul(rotX);
target.mul(rotY);
target.mul(rotZ);

Perhaps is what you search for:

http://www.java-gaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi?board=3D;action=display;num=1092691103

But what do you chose as Upper Vector? (0, 1, 0)? I use it the API way, lookAt(frompoint, topoint, upvector) and I'm getting bad results  

// 2nd part: the Behavior class

private class RotBehavior extends Behavior{
           TransformGroup tg = null;
           Transform3D t3d = null;
           Transform3D rot = null;
           
           RotBehavior(TransformGroup tg){
                 this.tg = tg;
                 
                 t3d = new Transform3D();
                 rot = new Transform3D();
                 rot.rotY(0.05);
           }
           
           public void initialize(){
                 this.wakeupOn(new WakeupOnAWTEvent(KeyEvent.KEY_PRESSED));
           }
           
           public void processStimulus(Enumeration criteria){
                 System.out.println("Accessing processStimulus...");
                 this.wakeupOn(new WakeupOnAWTEvent(KeyEvent.KEY_PRESSED));
                 
                 tg.getTransform(t3d);
                 t3d.mul(rot);
                 tg.setTransform(t3d);                  
           }
           
           
     }

I don't know if I understand your problem correctly as I don't know the Blockout game, and I'm a newbie too, but it should help you if you use one single Transform3D centrally and six in the Behaviors (for every direction). Your processStimulus should then get the central t3d, multiply it with the local and store it back into the TransformGroup.

I modified Sun's HelloUniverse so that it should be the way you want. I can't paste everything because this MessageBox has a max amount of chars:

// the lines in createSceneGraph
Transform3D before = new Transform3D();  // <----------------- THE ROTATION BEFORE
           before.rotX(0.5);
           TransformGroup objTrans = new TransformGroup(before);
           objTrans.setCapability(TransformGroup.ALLOW_TRANSFORM_WRITE);
           objTrans.setCapability(TransformGroup.ALLOW_TRANSFORM_READ);
           RotBehavior behave = new RotBehavior(objTrans);
           behave.setSchedulingBounds(bounds);
           objRoot.addChild(behave);
           objRoot.addChild(objTrans);



// to be continued ...

Hmmm, FRAPS really looks nice, but only available for Windows... (and I'm on Solaris).
The takeScreenshot method works fine, I have it in a frame triggered behavior and it writes output  
Thanks to both of you!!

Hoi!
As I'm getting deeper into Java3D I asked myself wether there is a possibility to have a real-time screenshot made by Java3D? Perhaps triggered by a behavior? Can Java3D go into non-real-time mode and just render frame after frame and write them out? That would ne nice for high quality scenes my CPU/GPU is too slow for  
Or is there a direct way for creating mpegs?
I digged in the API at Canvas3D/Screen3D etc., but there doesn't seem to be a method for this.
Greets,
cweila2s

Yesterday the bug was fixed. For anyone who is interested, jump to
https://java3d.dev.java.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=14
for the bug report and resolve.

Yep, I did a bug report. Let's see how they do  

Hoi!
Currently I'm doing some stuff with Interpolators and Behaviour who work really fine, except for two things:

First I randomly get an NullPointerException for my SoundSheduler, which is quite eerie for I don't use any sound (and thus have nothing set with sound)... but why?

java.lang.NullPointerException
     at javax.media.j3d.SoundScheduler.activate(SoundScheduler.java:714)
     at javax.media.j3d.MasterControl.viewActivate(MasterControl.java:2534)
     at javax.media.j3d.MasterControl.handlePendingRequest(MasterControl.java:3027)
     at javax.media.j3d.MasterControl.doWork(MasterControl.java:2951)
     at javax.media.j3d.MasterControlThread.run(MasterControlThread.java:28)

Secondly, when I want to have Spheres collide it does what I want, except for the times when the Spheres aren't in their places. I definitely put them in the right coords! Sometimes they are good, sometimes they are about 1 meter  up.
Summa summarum, it all works, but only sometimes. has anyone experienced something similar?
A fine weekend to you,
cweila2s

I just had an complete deinstall of everything javalike. I installed it again and it works, heavens know why exactly!
Nevertheless, a big THANKS for your time and help :-)

I got the Solaris-version from j3d.org. I'm just a Solaris newbie, but I tried the .so but failed to get it work.
I set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the containing directory, the .so is also in the jre's dirs, what to do else?

Ok, found one named so, but what am I to do with it?
How can I plug it into normal Java, or into Eclipse?

Hoi!
This is a very basic question, but I can't figure it out.
I'm trying to get JAVA3D work under Eclipse on an SOLARIS platform. Eclipse was no problem, got an up-to-date JRE, JAVA3D and OpenGL.
Problem1: Counldn't find J3D.dll anywhere, so I downloaded one from the internet.
Problem2: When starting HelloUniverse, Eclipse gives me this "no j3d in java.library path..." error.
I think j3d.dll is in nearly every directory of my jre and I had no success when trying to set a parameter -Djava.library.path=/dir/ in Preferences/Java/InstallesJREs.
What can I do? Which property in Eclipse is to set?
Thanks,
Chris