hi i'm quite new to Java3D and i've succeded in making an acceptable 3D engine i plan to use for making games- however i do have a few problems: (now i know i'm asking A LOT of questions, so if you want you can just gives links and i'll be OK
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first, i really don't understand those 3D rotations- i have a terrain and i want a car to rotate on the terrain. i already managed to calculate the height at any point on the terrain however i juste can't rotate the car to lay correctly anywhere on the terrain- i understand nothing about those quaternions and matrixes. of course there's lookAt but it's not THAT useful is my model is not in the right orientation at first
i've never been able to get double-buffering to work inside a Canvas 3D and have found NO documention nor any kind of help anywhere except the Java3D API- it mentions many methods that talk about double-buffering but there's no instruction (i've seen) about how to use them together.
also i've been trying to animate characters- but i just have really big problems. What i've down up to now is model a character in a 3D app and save files in various positions then i load the different frames as GeometryInfo objects and apply them to the Character's shape3D however this way i have to remap the texture for every frame so the texture seems to "slide" on the character as it moves.
I'd also have liked to make a little code to take two positions and act as though they were keyframes and calculate intermediate postions, however it doesn't work because my 3D modelling app does not always seem to save the vertices in the same order and i have no way to tell which is which so animating is quite hard
for animating i know i could also make some kind of puppet out of small models representing each part of the body however i really lack 3d rotation knowledge to use it efficiently
thanks!!!
