An Extendable Java Rendering Toolkit Version 1.0 Beta 6.

Sun Aug 28 01:43:33 EST 2005

The package is divided into four parts:

The source tree for the toolkit, this provides the necessary classes to support the XML parser as well as provide support classes for basic objects and shaders. The API documentation can be found here.
The tools directory which contains some basic tools for running the renderer, displaying pictures, doing basic image conversion, and dumping data out of 3ds files.
The examples directory, which contains a couple of examples of input files, and a few shaders. You can find instructions on the examples here.
Finally there is an implementation of javax.vecmath, which was written by Kenji Hiranbe - you can find details on that here.

The license the locally developed code is released under can be found here.

Tools and Running the Examples

The example files serve to demonstrate various aspects of the tool kit.

In these cases all the renderings are driven by the RML parser which identifies class names from the begin tags where required and uses Java's reflection API to construct the objects.

Note: the following is assuming you have the classes directory (../classes) in your class path.

The parser can be run by the command:


java org.autochthonous.graphics.rt.tools.Parser file

where file is one of the ".rml" files in this directory. There is also a render script/bat file in the tools directory which can be used to execute the above command.

The images generated can be displayed by the Disp program, the command for this is:


java org.autochthonous.graphics.rt.tools.Disp file

where file is a ".pix" file. There is also a disp script/bat file in the tools directory which can be used to execute the above command.

There is also a application for converting ".pix" files into ".ppm" files. The command to run to do a conversion is:


java org.autochthonous.graphics.rt.tools.PixToPPM file

where file is a ".pix" file. This application will produce a file ending in the ".ppm" extension with the same base name as the ".pix" file. The tools directory contains a wrapper pixtoppm for running this command.

Lastly, as 3ds files are binary there is a tool for dumping out the material names and bounding box for objects defined in a 3ds file. The command to print out the properties is:


java org.autochthonous.graphics.tools.ThreeDStudioDump file

The tools directory contains a wrapper 3dsdump for running this command.

How the parser locates objects it needs

When the parser is looking for a class file it searches the following packages in order, to find the class it wants:

            "",
            "org.autochthonous.graphics.rt.objects",
            "org.autochthonous.graphics.rt.models",
            "org.autochthonous.graphics.rt.shaders.ct",
            "org.autochthonous.graphics.rt.util",
            "org.autochthonous.graphics.rt",
            "org.autochthonous.graphics.rt.renderers"

The upshot of this is if you want to introduce your own objects and shaders, further extending the RML parser's capabilities, it is just a matter of having your class files appear somewhere in the above path, most appropriately in the "" or root package.

Please send feed back to dgh@autochthonous.org.

Enjoy!

PS. Note the homepage for this package is http://xjrt.sourceforge.net