Wow, I think I've finally got something running, and yes it is fast
(relative to using OrderedGroups and BranchGroups). I have taken Doug
Twilleager's advice (many thanks) and have disconnected the
"transparent" portion of my scene graph and am rendering it in
immediate-mode. Here are a couple of issues with this technique though:
* Lighting: you have to do lighting yourself; thus you need to know
what lights would have been active if your objects were still in the
scene graph
* Behaviors: if your transparent object is coupled with a behavior in
the same part of the scene graph (which is now disconnected), the
behavior of course will not be called; one good example is the
Billboarding of a transparent tree.
(BTW, I tried switching to OrientedShape3D and still got nothing. Never
used it before so I may have been doing something wrong.)
* Selection: my co-worker and I figure that selection of these
immediate-mode objects will not work; not quite sure how to get around
this one; this hasn't hurt me (yet), but I'm afraid that it will
eventually.
* Collision: same as selection I'm sure; I don't use collision, so I can
live without.
Doug, if you have any suggestions on behaviors (like is there a way to
do immediate-mode execution of a behavior, like just calling
processStimulus) or on selections, we'd like to hear them. I honestly
believe that transparent object rendering is the greatest drawback to
Java3D at this time.
-Lee
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