Before I launch into this note I want to set the premise. By reading your question I am assuming you want to show text within the 3d scene.
The technology to display text in 3d can only be done 2 ways. One way is done with a texture and another way is done with geometry. Text3d uses geometry in a Shape3d that has the shape of the letters, all done with triangles in real geometry. All other methods depend on textures to show the text. For text to be crisp it has to be positioned in such a way that it aligned with the image plate and transformed such that one texel = one pixel. If you took created a 512x512 texture with a bunch of text on it and threw it on a cube within your scene, you would be able to read the text from some orientations and less so from others. You described your problem as not be solvable by an overlay. A 3d overlay manages text panes and keeps them aligned to the screen, which is an optimal way of doing text panels, chat boxes, and controls within the 3d world. If you need to display text within the 3d scene then the image which comprises the texture needs to be sent to the card. Big textures take a long time to stream over to the card. The bigger the texture and the more frequently you update it, the slower your framerate will be. That is why people who write overlay systems do a lot of extra work to minimize the impact by breaking up the image into lots of smaller textures, only sending updates to the card for those subtextures which matter. Dave Yazel ----- Original Message ----- From: xhsun <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2002 10:28 PM Subject: [JAVA3D] ask help for display long text on an 3D object Sorry for the unclear of my last message. I need to display large amout of text on the surface of an object as part of the scene, which is different from text overlay. Read from the previous archive, there is an example using textured quad, but that's actually similar to Text2D and the time to load long text is not acceptable. Even though the computer can be fast enough to create the texture image from the text, what we get will be a big image but not sth like the Text area in Java with a scroll bar. Could someone tell me whether it is possible to create a Java Text area on top of an 3d object? Thanks in advance. xiaohua =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
