Hi David,
"Jarzabek, David" wrote:
> I'm new to Java3D and the group, so if I've missed an obvious source
> for answers to this, please point me in the right direction.
welcome to this list :-)
> I didn't see an explanation in the FAQ and from the portions of the
> tutorials
> and API descriptions I've looked at so far. It looks to me that the basic
> building blocks for surfaces are strips of triangles or quads. There are
> several loader classes available for more complex surfaces, but I didn't
> see anything in the Java3D API which would allow anything more
> complex than the strips.
That's true. Every Geometry is based upon points, lines, triangles, strips,
fans or quads.
> The implication is that loaders basically need to decompose more complex
> surfaces into strips. Am I correct in this assumption?
There are some tools available that do this for you. Take a look at the
GeometryInfo class and the Triangulator, NormalGenerator and Stripifier in
com.sun.j3d.utils.geometry.
> If so, doesn't that basically require loading twice as many nodes into the
> model? The edges of each strip would be duplicates of the edges of
> adjacent strips. Could anyone shed some light on how the internal
> rendering process handles this? Are the duplicates culled internally?
There are classes which are subclassed javax.media.j3d.IndexedGeometryArray.
They store each vertex only once and use indices to use them.
Hope that helps :-)
Andreas
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