Does anyone have any ideas for implementing circular axis handles for the purpose of rotating an object?
I was thinking of creating a sphere and then hiding the inner geometry and just showing one horizontal loop and one vertical loop. Don’t know if this is practical though as I don’t have a lot of experience with Java 3D :P.
I’m not sure what you mean by axis handles. Do you want to click on the loop and drag it to rotate it? If thats the case, there should be a behavior for that – look in the behaviors for more specifics.
sorry, wasn’t that clear in my question. i meant ideas for creating the actual handles themselves, the geometry behind them. since there aren’t bezier curves or nurbs in Java 3d you would have to use vertices to create the circles i guess.
any ideas as to how the rotation handles are created in a program like Maya?
So you mean the red, green, and blue arrows that you can click on to move an object (with the translate tool selected) and the red, green, blue, and yellow circules (with the rotate tool) in Maya?
I’m not sure what they use for that but I would guess they have a cylinder geometry that they stretch and strink.
So thats what I would suggest for j3d, use the Cylinder object with no top and no bottom. Make the height really small. You should be able to stretch and shrink the thing accordingly.
thanks for the suggestion. will give it a bash. 