Following a conversation with Ken and Romain, it’s time to ask the help of a larger forum.
I’m currently starting to evaluate different approaches to creating a look-and-feel based on real 3D rendering (project page at [1], but it doesn’t contain anything yet).
One of the ideas that i was thinking about was this: for each frame, traverse its hierarchy (all controls) and create a 3D model containing all those controls. Then, paint the entire scene, and later use portions of the rendered image to render each one of the controls (in paintBackground). This way, each control will not only paint itself, but will also contain reflections of the nearby controls (if it’s “shiny” enough).
I’m new to the 3D world in Java, so perhaps i’m missing something more elegant. What would be the best way to create a 3D LAF, and what technology suites best? Is JOGL the way to go, is it an overkill, is there something else more suitable for this particular task? Do i really need the Java2D / Java3D integration here, since the application itself stays 2D, only the painting is done using 3D engine.
Just to clarify: I’m not planning on creating new widgets instead of those that are in Swing. Instead: let’s say you have a frame with two buttons. Then, in the background you create a 3D scene with two “tubes” (wire models that represent those buttons), set all the various parameters (texture, light sources, what not) and request the scene to be painted. This may be done in a separate thread. Then, when Swing requests me to paint the background of each one of the buttons, i just go to the painted scene, find the relevant portion of the image and simply paint it on the provided graphics (kind of like what GLJPanel does).
Thanks in advance for your thoughts
Kirill