Java3D: Tutorials, Projects, General 3D Programming

Question

I've been thinking about playing with Java3D. But first I would like to know if anyone has done much with it? What types of projects have you done and what tutorials/examples/guides did you use to learn it? What are your general thoughts about the API? Is it well developed? Can you program games or do any physical modeling with it?

Thanks for your input.

Also, not sure what good tags are so feel free to change them as you see fit.

Answer 1

I have tried to develop in it about 4-5 years ago, and my impression is that while it was initially a great idea and had some good design going for it, Sun eventually stopped working on it and moved it to the purgatory of a "community project" where it has slowly been dying.

I was working at the time on a 3D conferencing application and kept running around barriers in the implementation on my platform, with other mechanisms (e.g., 3D sound), rendering options, embedding, etc... The API is simply not rich enough compared to what you could get with things like DirectX or OpenGL and isn't sufficiently supported.