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.
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.
If you want to experiment with 3D, it's far easier to get up and running than to try to do anything with DirectX (although the DirectX API more closely matches what game developers actually do, of course).
The fact that it's community-supported does mean you won't get a lot of richness today, but for a lot of tools, it's still plenty capable. For instance, a simple data visualization tool for business - not for games - is easy to do in Java3D (this is what I use it for, mostly).
Java 3D is nice and easy to get started with, and it uses a scene graph. However, I have worked with Java3D and I must say that at least as far as the version from May 2010 goes, it still is with problems regarding memory management.
So if you intend to play around with it a bit, it's great, but if you are thinking on developing one more serious application, I would recommend you to try other alternatives because Java3D will most likely lead you into OutOfMemory exceptions and such things, even when you use the appropriate methods to manipulate nodes from the scene graph...