Plotting dense 3D point clouds ( or mesh) in java

Question

I am gonna be writing java code to plot 3D point clouds. Someone suggested me to go for java 3D libraries however it is apparently dead (this reference) and not apparently good idea go to with JMonkey either (same reference) . That link was posted in 2009 and we are in 2012. All I want to do is to plot a dense 3D point cloud, say 5 million points, and to be able to rotate it / or zoom in real-time. I know the algorithms for rendering and stuff however I need a set of 3D java library with active community and support ( if any).

Please consider Desktop and also Web applications while suggesting me the solution.

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

Not a scenegraph, but LWJGL offers an easy wrapper around OpenGL, so you could quite easily construct a list of quads to represent your points and setup/modify a view to display and rotate them depending on user input.

This should work in applets also to cover your web targets.

Answer 2

and not apparently good idea go to with JMonkey either (same reference)

What you reference there is more than three years old, ancient in terms of technology.

jME has come back in a big way since then. jME3 is it an extraordinarily stable beta with Android support, improved physics support (both JBullet as well as a native wrapper), an SDK with scene editor, lots of user-contributed plugins, and an extremely active community.

There are a number of successful games making use of it as well, most notably Mythruna and 3079.

What you're looking to do is easily accomplished in jME and we'd invite you to come on over and try it out. http://jmonkeyengine.org

Answer 3

jzy3d is what you are looking for.

Jzy3d is an open source (BSD) java library that allows a rapid display of 3d scientific data, either surfaces, scatter plots, bar charts, and lot of other 3d primitives. The API provides support for rich interactive charts, with colorbars, tooltips and overlays. Axis and chart layout can be fully customized and enhanced.

Answer 4

I would use JavaFX for this. It is already included in JDK 8 and the project is well alive.

Contrary to LWJGL, there is more and better documentation. Also LWJGL being a thin wrapper, will force you to learn OpenGL as soon as you need to do any transformation, and that will take you some time.

Jzy3d is a higher level API but the tutorial is not free.

JME3 is overkill and, as long as my limited experience with it taught me, you'll need to use Blender to create the model (I might be wrong).

There is a lot of documentation for JavaFX online. If you don't mind buying a book, "JavaFX for Dummies" is quite good, although basic.