Book Image

jMonkeyEngine 3.0 : Beginner's Guide

Book Image

jMonkeyEngine 3.0 : Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

jMonkeyEngine 3.0 is a powerful set of free Java libraries that allows you to unlock your imagination, create 3D games and stunning graphics. Using jMonkeyEngine's library of time-tested methods, this book will allow you to unlock its potential and make the creation of beautiful interactive 3D environments a breeze."jMonkeyEngine 3.0 Beginner's Guide" teaches aspiring game developers how to build modern 3D games with Java. This primer on 3D programming is packed with best practices, tips and tricks and loads of example code. Progressing from elementary concepts to advanced effects, budding game developers will have their first game up and running by the end of this book.From basic concepts and project creation to building a complex 3D Game, you will learn to layout 3D scenes, make them interactive and add various multi-media effects.You will find answers to common questions including best practices and approaches, how game characters can act and interact, how to simulate solid walls and physical forces, how to take it online to play over a network and much more.From Zero to Hero, start your journey to make your game idea a reality.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
jMonkeyEngine 3.0 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – rotate it!


Your cubes are at the right location and have the right size. Now you want to turn them to face in a specific direction. In an actual game, for example, you may want to turn characters to face an interesting part of the scene. Again, you can either use absolute or relative rotation.

For every rotation, you have to specify three float values—x, y, and z, one for each axis, around which you want to rotate. In contrast to translation and scale, rotations are not expressed in world units, but in radians. Don't worry—to convert between the familiar 360 degrees to radians, simply multiply the degree value by the built-in FastMath.DEG_TO_RAD constant, or FastMath.RAD_TO_DEG to convert it back. You can find this constant in the com.jme3.math.FastMath package.

As an example, let's rotate the two cubes by 45 degrees around the x and y axes, respectively:

  1. Convert 45 degrees to radians:

    float r = FastMath.DEG_TO_RAD * 45f;
  2. To rotate geom2 around the x axis, add the following...