just a small investigation…
what do you use as GUI in your 3D applications? (for example for menus and other simple stuff)
standart AWT components?
rendering 2D directly? with J3DGraphics2D?
or just Text3D & Shapes with behaviors?
something else?
what are you using as GUI components?
2D components seem to have too much of a speed impact.
Over at www.j3d.org you can pick up some overlay stuff that gives you 2d “canvases” built out of 3d objects. This seems like the way to do it, by the j3d.org implementation seems to be very complicated.
I use a home grown implementation that does a pretty similar thing. Its available at http://www.newdawnsoftware.com under resources. (J3D HUD).
Kev
We started with Swing, but that proved to be a bad performer, so we’ve switched to the j3d.org Overlay system. It works pretty well, and I didn’t find it that complicated.
One annoying thing – I have an old copy of David Yazel’s Overlay code, which is the foundation of the j3d.org Overlays, but some key stuff is missing that easily enables scrolling text for Chat-like overlays. Will Holcomb has also done a ChatManager based on the old version of the Overlay code, but it’s not compatible with the new j3d.org version. :-/
Kev, I’m going to take a look at your HUD code now… 
How does it perform? I tried Text2D once which basically uses the same mechanism. But updating the texture was incredible expensive. Is j3d.rg/newdawn somwhat better there?
Swing on top of Java3D?
Well, I ran your demo and wow! very nice! If I could ever get my server code to work right, I will add some hud objects to my clients.
very nice.
laptop dell, PIII 1 ghz, 512 ram, no video card worth mentioning.
got 97-120 fps depeindg on how close I was to the sphere.