Difference in rendering properties vs Linux/OSX and Windows

When I setup a scene with a mesh, on windows it renders nicely using a material + a diffuse color. On linux and osx there isn't enough variation in the color. It switches pretty drastically, and leaves my objects with a mottled appearance.



The mesh is an indexed triangle array.

    IntexedTriangleArray surfaces = new IndexedTriangleArray(nodes.size(), GeometryArray.COORDINATES|GeometryArray.NORMALS, 3*triangles.size());
    //set the positions, indexes and normals here.
    Shape3D shape =  new Shape3D(surfaces);

The problem could lie in my normal calculation, but it works on windows.

I create the appearance with a material using the 5 parameters.

    private Appearance createSurfaceAppearance() {
        Appearance a = new Appearance();
        float[] rgb = color.getRGBComponents(new float[4]);

        Color3f ambient = new Color3f(adjust(rgb, amb));
        Color3f emmisive = new Color3f(adjust(rgb, emm));
        Color3f diffuse = new Color3f(adjust(rgb, dif));
        Color3f specular = new Color3f(adjust(rgb, spec));

        Material mat = new Material(
                ambient,
                emmisive,
                diffuse,
                specular,
                shininess);
        a.setMaterial(mat);
       
        return a;
    }

The adjust method takes a value between 0 and 2. If the value is less than 1 it decreases the magnitude of each component. If the value is > 1 then the value above 1 is added to the color. Eg. 0 is black, 1 is the desired color and 2 is white.

I render the scene with some lights.

        ambientLight = new AmbientLight(new Color3f(new float[]{
                ambient, ambient, ambient
        }));
        directionalLightA = new DirectionalLight(
            new Color3f(directional, directional, directional),
                dir);

`ambient` and `directional` are values between 0 and 1.

There are a lot of ways I could be doing this wrong, and I am willing to make a complete working example if that helps. It's just the difference is between windows and linux/osx so maybe there is a default parameter I need to change.

Thanks!

Hello

Which hardware, which version of Java and which version of Java3D and JOGL do you use on your computer?

The image shown above is using Java 25 on OSX 26.01 M series.

From `Map<?, ?> vuMap = VirtualUniverse.getProperties();`

j3d.pipeline, JOGL
j3d.specification.vendor,
j3d.specification.version, 1.7
j3d.version, 1.7.2_final

I'm using JOGL 2.6

If I query the properties of a canvas 3D.

    GraphicsConfiguration config = GraphicsEnvironment
                .getLocalGraphicsEnvironment().getDefaultScreenDevice()
                .getBestConfiguration(template);
    Map<?, ?> c3dMap = new Canvas3D(config).queryProperties();

Then I get:

textureEnvCombineAvailable true
textureImageUnitsCombinedMax 16
textureAnisotropicFilterDegreeMax 16.0
texture3DHeightMax 2048
textureLodOffsetAvailable false
texture3DDepthMax 2048
textureLodRangeAvailable true
textureHeightMax 16384
textureFilter4Available false
doubleBufferAvailable true
compressedGeometry.majorVersionNumber 1
stereoAvailable true
textureAutoMipMapGenerationAvailable true
sceneAntialiasingAvailable true
compressedGeometry.minorVersionNumber 0
texture3DWidthMax 2048
compressedGeometry.minorMinorVersionNumber 2
vertexAttrsMax 10
shadingLanguageGLSL true
sceneAntialiasingNumPasses 1
native.vendor Apple
textureUnitStateMax 8
native.version 2.1 Metal - 90.5
textureImageUnitsMax 16
textureNonPowerOfTwoAvailable true
textureBoundaryWidthMax 1
native.renderer Apple M4 Pro
textureCoordSetsMax 8
texture3DAvailable true
textureImageUnitsVertexMax 16
textureWidthMax 16384
maxVaryingVectors 0
stencilSize 0
textureCombineDot3Available true
textureDetailAvailable false
textureCubeMapAvailable true
textureSharpenAvailable false
textureCombineSubtractAvailable true
textureColorTableSize 0

For a linux setup, it is running through a VNC with an NVIDIA. I can provide the same information if it helps.

Thank you

Please can you try without VNC and without any virtual machine?

Both linux and osx produce the same results. I get a sort of mottled appearance.

- locally running on osx 26.01 M series and linux (fedora 42 gnome + wayland + nvidia gpu)
- running remotely with vnc or x forwarding rocky linux 8

Java3D built in shapes/primitives render fine. So I changed the way I update my values.

From this:

        surfaces = new IndexedTriangleArray(nodes.size(), GeometryArray.COORDINATES|GeometryArray.NORMALS, 3*triangles.size());
        surfaces.setCoordinates(0,positions);
        surfaces.setCoordinateIndices(0,triangle_index);
        surfaces.setNormals(0, normals);
        sufaces.setNormalIndices(0, triangle_index);
        surface_object.setGeomtry(surfaces);

To this:

        surfaces = new IndexedTriangleArray(nodes.size(), GeometryArray.COORDINATES, 3*triangles.size());
        surfaces.setCoordinates(0,positions);
        surfaces.setCoordinateIndices(0,triangle_index);

        NormalGenerator ng = new NormalGenerator();
        GeometryInfo gi = new GeometryInfo(surfaces);
        ng.generateNormals(gi);
        surface_object.setGeometry( gi.getGeometry() );

Now everything seems to render normally. I don' know why this fixes it. The normals I was calculating worked fine on windows and older versions of java3d but the new way is better for multiple reasons.


As a side note, these examples https://github.com/philjord/java3d-examples do not work for me on osx. I had to manually specify all of the jogl/glugen/jocl et. libraries other wise it defaulted to the 2.5 versions which crash on arm based mac I'm using. Then the program doesn't crash, but it also doesn't initialize a java3d canvas properly. I can start an issue there though.

Ensure that there is no other version conflicting on your machine under OS X. Maybe fill a bug report.