I am looking at doing some UI type work in J3d and I’ve got as far as realising I want to be writing my information onto textures and updating them onto the shapes I am using as interface panes. So far so conceptually easy ( I haven’t started writing the code yet… ) but what I don’t really know is how to change textures while they are on the geometry. I have a suspicion that this is done using by-reference textures and I was wondering whether anyone could suggest any useful examples, tutorials or open_gl equivalents that I could use to get up to speed on the processes involved and which classes I will need to be using so I can at least find the relevant parts of the Javadocs…
Breakfast, You are on the right track with by reference textures. Classes that update textures in real time must implement the ImageComponent2D.Updater interface. When it comes time to update the texture (via behavior for example) a method should be called that calls the updateData method on the image passing the implementer of ImageComponent2D.Updater. This will inturn call the updateData method on your class where you can change the texture.
Here are two example methods:
public void nextFrame(int ticks) {
/* Called during animation. Because
- this object is an image updated, get
- the image and pass this object to
- the updateData method on the image.
*/
this.ticks = ticks;
ImageComponent2D image = (ImageComponent2D) getAppearance().getTexture().getImage(0);
image.updateData(this, 0, 0, IMAGE_SIZE, IMAGE_SIZE);
}
public void updateData(ImageComponent2D image, int x, int y, int width, int height){
// This example alters the texture in realtime.
BufferedImage bi = image.getImage();
generateImage(bi);
}
Mike
Thanks- that was exactly what I needed to know. My UI prototype is working fine- it will be even better when I have worked out how to set up the textureCoordinates so that the writing is horizontal rather than vertical…