Mobile 3D Graphics: Learning 3D Graphics with the Java Micro Edition

Description
3D graphics capabilities continue to advance in leaps and bounds. Once the domain of high-end computers, amazing 3D graphics are now readily available for mobile devices. Mobile 3D Graphics: Learning 3D Graphics with the Java Micro Edition is your hands-on guide to this exciting new world! Learn the fundamentals of 3D graphics by using the Mobile 3D Graphics API (JSR 184). Focusing on the Java Platform, Micro Edition, this book is filled with a multitude of easy-to-understand, real-world examples. You will start with the basics of 3D programming, but there is plenty of advanced coverage too, including quaternion math, environment mapping, and creating articulated characters. You will also learn how to create 3D content in in the open-source tool Blender, import the artwork into your application, and then tailor the export to meet your needs. By the time you are finished, you will possess 3D graphic skills that will easily extend to other APIs, including OpenGL ES with JSR 239 and the MascotCapsule V3 API, which are both featured in the appendix. Whether you are a complete 3D graphics novice, a game programmer ready to extend your skills to a new arena, or a software developer hoping to break into the game industry, this book will serve as a one-of-a-kind, comprehensive guide to mobile 3D graphics!

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Mobile 3D Graphics: with OpenGL ES and M3G

Description
The Mobile 3D Graphics book is a tutorial-type book that helps to understand Mobile 3D APIs, OpenGL ES and M3G. The book was written for graphics application developers, game developers, Java developers, and students.

The book consists of three parts: anatomy of a graphics engine, OpenGL ES, and M3G, each divided into chapters. In each chapter, one aspect of the mobile 3D graphics is discussed (e.g. in the first part of the book, chapters include: low-level rendering, animation, scene management, and performance/scalability). Each chapter discusses the important issues, and sample code segments are provided.

The best features of the book include: its in-depth coverage of the mobile graphics techniques; how to start developing OpenGL ES and M3G application; performance tips and pitfalls; and how to accelerate your code using fixed-point arithmetic; and how to increase performance of Java code. The Web site that complements the book(http://www.graphicsformasses.com) contains code samples and demos.

I found the book to be a good introduction to mobile graphics programming, perhaps the best among mobile 3D graphics programming books. The authors are also among the experts of 3D mobile graphics: they helped to start the OpenGL ES and M3G standardization groups, and actively contributed to development of these standards.

On the flip side, as the other reviewers have said, OpenGL ES 2.0 is not included in this book. But, it will be some time until we will see widespread use of OpenGL ES 2.0 enabled mobile devices. Even then, developers will still be able to use OpenGL 1.x on 2.0 hardware, with appropriate 1.x drivers). So, as of this writing, this is not an outdated book!

Also, a complete case study (e.g. a small OpenGL ES or M3G game, complete with user input, rendering optimization, etc.) would be a very useful addition to the book.

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Mobile 3D Game Development: From Start to Market

Description
This book is really very well written and the only one I know on the market of its kind. It's great if you are moving from 2D to 3D J2ME games. I gave it 4, instead of 5, stars firstly, because all the art work is done for Maya, Lightwave, or 3DS. These are very expensive modelling tools. The authors could have used an excellent alternative, Blender, which is just as powerful but free. Secondly, the authors use NetBeans. A better choice might have been Eclipse with the EclipseME plug-in since I believe the Eclipse community is bigger and perhaps more resourceful. Thirdly, there are a number of small errors in the book, particularly in Chapter 7. Finally, speaking of Ch 7, the book is rough going with the math. It's almost as if the authors were afraid to go into more detail knowing many people might be turned off by 3D math. But this seems to me just the place to slow down rather than breeze through the subject. For instance, they don't explain how or why matrix inversion is used nor how it can fail. Then, they go through all this math and don't give example code or even a snippet, of how to use it, for instance, the Transform class. That's too bad. They had this tiger (called 3D math) by the tail and let it go. Actually, to cover more of the math and details of mobile 3D I would recommend Hofele, C., "Mobile 3D Graphics", as a companion text. Hofele is also very good although the focus is less on mobile games than mobile 3D.

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J3DME

Description
J3DME provides fast simple 3D rendering capabilities for small devices running Java. The engine will support wireframe and surface renderer. Supported UI rendering architectures are MIDP(J2ME), WABA, AWT and KJAVA.

Comments
At the moment I'm able to compile project with minor modifications, but output seems to be incorrect.

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M3DEA

Description
M3DEA (Mobile 3D Engine API) facilitates the development of 3D games for mobile devices, by using the Java language with support to the Mobile 3D Graphics API specification (M3G) and J2ME.

Comments
This library seems really interesting, but again no sample to test it.

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Free 3D Game Tileset

On this site you can find many 3D and isometric tiles.

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EGL

EGL is a pure java 3D Graphics API which was designed for J2ME mobile devices and based on CLDC 1.0 only, which provided OpenGL-like interface and supports basic 3D pipeline and texture.

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