[JAVA3D] AmbientLight trouble

[RWGRAY]

I am having trouble finding the cause of a problem with AmbientLight. 

 

The problem is that I have a couple of spheres in the scene (and some lines) and the spheres are black.   (Lines are white, but I used ColoringAttributes to color the lines, not Material.)

 

When I add a PointLight to the scene, the spheres then have color.  And I can change Diffuse  color and Transparency of the spheres, so I know I am working with a good Appearance (with Material, no ColoringAttributes) applied to the spheres.

 

But I only get black spheres with just the AmbientLight in the scene.

 

I extend the AmbientLight class and add it to my scene graph.  Here is the init() method called when MyAmbientLight object is created.

 

  void init()
  {
    Color3f lightColor = new Color3f(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f);
    setColor(lightColor);
    nch7.insertAnimationValueColor3f(0, vLightColor, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f);

 

    setCapability(AmbientLight.ALLOW_COLOR_WRITE);
    setCapability(AmbientLight.ALLOW_STATE_READ);
    setCapability(AmbientLight.ALLOW_STATE_WRITE);
    setCapability(AmbientLight.ALLOW_INFLUENCING_BOUNDS_READ);

 

    worldBounds = new BoundingSphere(new Point3d(0.0,0.0,0.0), 100000.0);

 

    setInfluencingBounds(worldBounds);

 

    setEnable(true);

 

  } // init()

 

I know the AmbientLight is in the scene because I printed out the isLive() and it returned true.

 

And the influencing bounding sphere is set correctly because I print getInfluencingBounds:

AmbientLight: BoundingSphere: Center=(0.0, 0.0, 0.0)  Radius=100000.0

 

What am I missing?  Why would the objects (spheres) have color when I add a PointLight but not with the AmbientLight?

 

I am trying to narrow down what the problem could be:

1) Not an Appearance/Material problem because colors are just fine with a point light,

2) AmbientLight is in the scene (isLive),

3) AmbientLight has a large influencing bounds which includes the sphere locations (0,0,3), (0,2,0),

4) Explicitly set AmbientLight enabled (getEnabled() returns true),

5) AmbientColor  (getColor()) set to  Color3f: (1.0, 1.0, 1.0).

 

It is not obvious to me what else I should check.  Any suggestions?

 

 

Cheers,

Bob Gray