I want to make sure I'm in the right place.
I'm developing a Java app and I'd like to add the capability to generate photo-realistic images & fly-through style movies of an environment defined and altered within my application. Imagine something like the user moving around furniture in a room and then having the application generate some image of the room and maybe a movie of a path through the room. I don't need real-time rendering. It's ok if it take a few seconds to generate the visuals.
I stumbled across jMonkeyEngine after looking at Blender a bit but this seems more suited to my app. jMonkey looks like exactly what I need but I was hoping some experts here could back that up before I dive in too far.
I'm hoping once I come up to speed I might be able to contribute as well. It'd be cool to be a part of this.
Also, I read the article on the home page about choosing between versions 2 & 3. I'll like for my app not to require too high end a machine for my users so I was leaning toward version 2 but ideally I'd also like to have the latest capabilities available and learn the new code so I can contribute sooner. Any advice here would be much appreciated as well. How many potential users will I be eliminating going with version 3?
Thanks all! I'm really excited about trying this stuff out.
Chris
Afaik, jME is the best API for 3D rendering in Java in most ways. I have been programming Java for 9 months, haven't programmed anything before that except a little HTML. I got jME 2 one or two weeks ago and it's great 
I can't really say anything about if you should get version 2 or 3, but i took 2 and I think i made the right choice.
Hey csb welcome to the forums,
Both jme2 and jme3 are being actively developed for, so you would probably not realize any huge feature differences (besides SSAO and thePlatform :P) where as jme2 is stable jme3 is in alpha but is as capable as jme2. I like to think of both jme2 and 3 as different takes on what the original jme should have been. Either build would be suitable for your project. however if you want really low specs for your game then maybe jme2 would be a little better. jme2 is better documented and being stable their is less risk that a whole implementation would be changed also it loosely supports a plethora of 3d model formats and have and have cool offhand tools such as sceneMonitor and sceneWorker. jme3 on the other hand isn’t well documented though that will change soon, and its engine codebase is changing, though sometimes its unnoticeable to the user. jme3 makes use of obj and is tightly integrated around ogre.xml. It also has jmP which i think will have a scene editor soon which seems like it would help what your doing.
jme2 is a scenegraph and if all you want is to fly through a world full of models rendered in a specific way on lowend hardware then i’d say go for jme2
if your planning to go further and want next gen graphics that uses slightly higher specs (though the spec difference isn’t huge and is more modern) as well as a fully integrated game engine i’d say jme3
Thanks for the feedback guys.
Bonechilla - it does sound like jme2 is probably the best place for me to begin. I'll start digging into the tutorials this weekend. What are your thoughts on how difficult it be to later migrate from a jme2 implementation to one that uses the jme3 features/codebase?
it matters how far in you are and how much of a dependency you have build on certain functions and if you've taken a liking to certain jme2 libraries. For the most part even though these are two completely different beasts they have a lot of similarities though this is mostly on the user level. So besides a couple of quirks and design choices it shouldn't be too hard to port code.
Sounds goods. Thanks.
I'll start messing around with jme2. Hopefully I won't be back here asking too many questions.