I have a 3D scene setup and now I’d like to add a PIP display in the corner of the main screen that shows a separate 3D scene. How can I achieve this in jMonkeyEngine?
What you want is called “Offscreen Rendering” or “Render to Texture”.
That way you actually have a Textured Quad (which belongs to the GuiNode for your use case)
where would I find an example which demonstrates how to do off screen rendering with JMonkeyEngine?
See here: Render to Texture
and jmonkeyengine/TestRenderToTexture.java at master · jMonkeyEngine/jmonkeyengine · GitHub
reading through the wiki, I also found the following which shows how to implement a PIP:
https://wiki.jmonkeyengine.org/doku.php/jme3:advanced:multiple_camera_views
Yes, the view ports give you the opportunity to render another rectangle.
If your minimap is circular or n-gonal, then view port is inferior to render-to-texture.
So, the view port is good for split screens and rectangular minimaps.
The render-to-texture is good for anything non-rectangular…