Sam Hocking wrote: > I haven't found anything like this during my research and the 3D Galleries i > have found are normally implemented using VRML or Director and with a > personal homepage type set-up, being *very* hard-coded rather than > dynamically driven via a database etc!
There have been, over the years, a number of galleries done in VRML. The ones by Shout (IIRC) were all database driven, but unfortunately you don't have access to the source of those. Perhaps one thing that you could consider is using a VRML viewer as the output device and concentrate on developing the database backend. Then, for the java3d renderer you can use one of the VRML loaders around to load the content and provide any client-side navigation. FWIW, our main development contract this year is to provide a *very* simliar thing. For us, it is a library for rare books. There's two parts - viewing the book and wandering through a virtual library. For the visualisation/client side of the project we view it as VRML (actually, more correctly X3D). Our Java applet uses the EAI to fire up a VRML browser in the web page, load the content and then provide a bunch of navigation. On the server side is a pile of EJBs and Servlets to feed the content to the client. I was going to attach a screen shot and then realised the pic was about 100k - too big to send to the list. I'd offer you the code to do this, but unfortunately it's all proprietary stuff. We use the Xj3D open source VRML loader, which we also happen to develop and is quite popular for loading general 3D content either as an applet or standalone application. The applet itself is only 100 lines of code - most of which is setting up the swing environment. The library management is maybe 20 LoC at most. The rest is pure VRML. More on the various loaders for VRML here: http://www.j3d.org/utilities/loaders.html and direct to Xj3D http://www.web3d.org/TaskGroups/source/xj3d.html Xj3D is still under heavy development, so if you want to get your 3D graphics fix (because you find EJB/Servlet development boring, like I do) then feel free to help contribute to the Xj3D codebase. Plenty of things to do (we can line up Extrusion node for you if you wish ;P) -- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant ------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== 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".
