For the last five or six days I’ve been working very diligently to build a simple 3D isometric terrain rendering engine using JavaMonkeyEngine 3 (JME3). I was delighted when, by the end of the first night I had assembled the necessary geometries for my surface tiles and textured them. By the end of the second night I’d forced the camera into a parallel projection mode and positioned the scene with respect to the camera so that everything was rendered at the requisite angle.
From this point on, all I really need is to light the scene. However, this disarmingly simple thing has turned into a frustrating and heart-wrenching struggle. I have to conclude, after several days of hammering, chiseling, scraping, poring through source code, online tutorials, and relevant books on the subject, that JME3 is not going to work for my project.
After several confusing false starts, I decided to simplify the lighting problem. I ditched my complex models and implemented a Mesh that is, functionally, half of a cube. Just the 3 quads that face the camera. I computed the surface normals for these quads (this is very simple, because the object is a cube, and it is aligned to the X,Y, and Z axes), and then set up three directional spotlights. One red, one green, and one blue. The goal of my experiment was to shine each of these lights on a different face of the mesh. For comparison, I included a com.jme3.scene.shape.Box in the same node as my mesh.
One of the first things that I noticed was that the Box model had to be rotated slightly in order for its normal vectors to align properly—in other words, shining a light straight down from above (0,1,0) lit one of the back-facing quads on the cube. That was straightforward to resolve by rotating the cube. Still, as the days marched on, no combination of effort and experimentation would result in the effect that I was attempting to produce, which was a light shining down on the tile nearly vertically, while lighting the two vertical faces of the tile at noticeably different degrees. Eventually, I realized that even if I did manage to tweak and torque the normals around and the lights to get the effect I was after, it would almost certainly break or behave counterintuitively once I began to vary the angle of the top of my tiles, which is the whole point of this work.
I’ve decided to give up JME and work more directly with the Lightweight Java Games Library (LWJGL). I don’t need physics, collision detection, particle systems from a massive game engine. I just need rendering. Triangles, textures, and light. Still, it’s a big surprise, to come so frustratingly close to completion only to turn away from an otherwise excellent library.
