Java™ Media APIs: Cross-Platform Imaging, Media, and Visualization

Summary

Three dimensional graphics is a difficult topic that is made considerably easier by knowing some fundamental ideas about rendering, geometric modeling, and matrix transformations. Geometric objects, textures, lights, and other elements in the environment or visualization are organized together into a scene graph. A view volume is used to restrict rendering akin to what you would see by viewing the scene through a window. The elements of the scene that remain after clipping the viewing volume are rendered by the Java 3D renderer, which performs optimizations on the scene graph and its elements and then makes a reduced set of calls to a low-level API. Given an understanding of this basic information, the developer can proceed to understand ...