I’m a little puzzled. Java3D seems to tie materials to groups in OBJ files. The online documentation I’ve read for OBJ files seems to say that groups and materials are orthogonal.
What is correct, or is this a difference?
When I first tried the obj loader in Java3d I thought “OK…COOL”
But then I found out that 1) it splits all geometry into groups and 2) All you get is a scene and theres no way you can
access the geometry arrays (cause the annoying capability bits prohibit reading from the loaded geom arrays)
So basically you just have a big dumb piece of geometry (untextured I might add) that you can’t do anything with.
Yea, I split up my geometry pieces in separate files and use the vrml loader to import them in. You could do the same thing with OBJ. Now if you want to do what your talking about (having the loader to separate), then your best bet is to write your own loader (its a big pain in the butt though). You might be able to break up the file programatically and that way you don’t actually have to write a full blown loader; just a parser of sorts.
I was able to get textured geometry to load using the Sun Wavefront OBJ loader:
http://www.java-gaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=15871.0
You do get a scene but you can access the individual pieces of the scene.