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Turn a set of 3d coordinates into polygonal "landscape" in Java

I'm working on a visualization project. From the data I have calculated the X, Y, and Z coordinates for a large set of points. Using Processing it was very simple to draw this out with lines and dots.
From the top it looks like this:
And from a side angle you can see how it occupies 3D space
The part I'm struggling with is turning this into polygons. I need the end result to be something I can export as a .obj file, and then later open in Blender or similar 3D modelling programs.
The two main issues are that these points are not on a grid, but are instead organized in a circle based on radian angles, and that the triangle structure isn't all that simple.
I tried drawing out my own polygons (it's kinda sorta working), but I'm getting to the point where the maths are getting a bit too complex to handle and my code is bloated with arrays, if statements, and for loops...
Surely there must be a better way? Are there any plugins maybe that would help me with this task? Or some techniques I should take a look at?

Processing has screenX() and screenY() functions that take a 3D point and return a 2D point. That sounds like pretty much exactly what you're looking for. Please see the reference for more info.

How to rotate "Earth" by touching with GLES20 (Android)?

Yesterday I tried to solve a Problem I had the entire Day and it is still unsolved. I searched for every combinations of words I could imagine to find solutions on Google etc. But without success. :(
The Problem consists of following idea:
I started programming GLES20 (Not GLES10!) on Android. There are many other ways how to compute matrixes and objects. So there aren't any methods like "Pop" or "push" Matrix.
I want to rotate a globe/sphere only by touching and moving my fingers. Touching functions etc works fine but the rotation itself never does. Everytime I first rotate by x-axis and then rotating by y-axis the rotation is still computed by local space axis of the object and Not two global axis. This happens whatever I do... :/
There are some people searching the solution for the Same Problem, but mostly GLES10 or completly different programming languages, never GLES20 and Java.
I will also post some Code parts later, when I get access to a Computer.
perhaps someone already understands what my Problem is.
Thank you so much! :)
Chrise

In OpenGL ES 2.0 there aren't any of the matrix functions and you're supposed to take care of your own matrices. So, for pushing and popping matrices what you need to do is when you're drawing you copy your matrix to a temporary one, do whatever transformation on it and pass the temporary matrix to the vertex shader.

How to animate Rectangle on a Path2D object in Graphics2D context

I have just started learning basics about Graphics2D class, So far I am able to draw different objects and implements ActionListener to actually move them on screen by onKeyPress. So far so good, While I thought of doing something more complicated. I want to give a path to my object and animate it on that particular path only.
Something like, I will draw a line on sky and a plane should stick with that drawn line and keep it self to fly on that particular line. Now is it possible?
I don't need any sort of code, But few different method or ideas will let me get started working on this. A visualise elaboration of my idea is as below.
Start Point :
End Point :
Now as shown above, my yellow box(in future plane) should stick with given path while animating(path grey line)
My research so far,
I have searched my buzz words such as path in java, and found Path2D and GeneralPath classes, Does anyone know if I can use that to solve this.
Thanks

Great !
It reminds me of my first steps in IT. How much I enjoyed all this simple math stuff but that make things move on screen. :)
What you need is actually a linear interpolation . There are other sorts of interpolation and some api offer a nice encapsulation for the concept but here is the main idea, and you will quite often need this stuff :
you must rewrite your path
y = f (x )
as a function of time :
at time 0 the item will be on start position, at time 1 it will reach the end. And then you increment time (t) as you wish (0.001 every ms for instance).
So here is the formula for a simple linear path :
x = xstart + (xend-xstart) * t
y = ystart + (yend-ystart) * t
when t varies, you object will just move linearly along the path, linearly has speed will be constant on all the path. You could imagine some kind of gravtity attraction at end for instance, this would be modeled by a quadratic acceleration (t^2 instead of t) ...
Regards,
Stephane

First, make the ability to move from point a to point b. This is done with simple algebra.
Second, make the ability to take a path and translate it into points. Then when you're going to do curves, you're really just moving from point to point to point along that curve.
This is the most elementary way to do it and works for most instances.

What your talking about is simple 2D graphics and sprites. If that is all you need then for Java take a look at Java 2D Sprites If your leaning more towards or will eventually go with camera perspectives and wanting to view the animation from diferent angles the go with Java 3D from the OpenSource Java 3D.org. Either way what you want is a simple translating of the object along a line, pretty simple in either 2D or 3D.

You can try going trough the code of my open source college project - LANSim. It's code is available in Code menu. It does similar to what you are trying to do.

Changing Pivot Point in Java3D

I've imported some 3d models in java3D and I want to change the pivot point of my model from the origin to a specific point!
Please don't say to translate to origin, rotate and then translate back
I want to know the exact way .

This helped me. The idea of translation is good, actually, do it like follows:
Create a TransformGroup "tg" for example containing the node you would like to rotate and/or translate.
Be sure that you translate it to the point you want to be your pivot point.
Then, create a new TransformGroup containing tg, and rotate it.
Translate back then (translate with the same vector*(-1)).
Rotation around a specific point (eg, rotate around 0,0,0)
This helped me

If I understand what you mean, you should traverse the scene graph produced by the model loader, find any GeometryArrays in it, and translate all the coordinates in the GeometryArrays (this is no simple task -- coordinates can be stored in a number of ways). That way a simple rotation transform would rotate around a different pivot point than before.

How does Affine Transform really work in Java?

I have been using Affine Transform to rotate a String in my java project, and I am not an experienced programmer yet, so it has taking me a long time to do a seemingly small task.. To rotate a string.
Now I have finally gotten it to work more or less as I had hoped, except it is not as precisely done as I want... yet.
Since it took a lot of trial and error and reading the description of the affine transform I am still not quite sure what it really does. What I think I know at the moment, is that I take a string, and define the center of the string (or the point which I want to rotate around), but where does matrices come into this? (Apparently I do not know that hehe)
Could anyone try and explain to me how affine transform works, in other words than the java doc? Maybe it can help me tweak my implementation and also, I just would really like to know :)
Thanks in advance.

To understand what is affine transform and how it works see the wikipedia article.
In general, it is a linear transformation (like scaling or reflecting) which can be implemented as a multiplication by specific matrix, and then followed by translation (moving) which is done by adding a vector. So to calculate for each pixel [x,y] its new location you need to multiply it by specific matrix (do the linear transform) and then add then add a specific vector (do the translation).

In addition to the other answers, a higher level view:
Points on the screen have a x and a y coordinate, i.e. can be written as a vector (x,y). More complex geometric objects can be thought of being described by a collection of points.
Vectors (point) can be multiplied by a matrix and the result is another vector (point).
There are special (ie cleverly constructed) matrices that when multiplied with a vector have the effect that the resulting vector is equivalent to a rotation, scaling, skewing or with a bit of trickery translation of the input point.
That's all there is to it, basically. There are a few more fancy features of this approach:
If you multiply 2 matrices you get a matrix again (at least in this case; stop nit-picking ;-) ).
If you multiply 2 matrices that are equivalent to 2 geometric transformations, the resulting matrix is equivalent to doing the 2 geometric transformations one after the other (the order matters btw).
This means you can encode an arbitrary chain of these geometric transformations in a single matrix. And you can create this matrix by multiplying the individual matrices.
Btw this also works in 3D.
For more details see the other answers.

Apart from the answers already given by other I want to show a practical tip namely a pattern I usually apply when rotating strings or other objects:
move the point of rotation (x,y) to the origin of space by applying translate(-x,-y).
do the rotation rotate(angle) (possible also scaling will be done here)
move everything back to the original point by translate(x,y).
Remember that you have to apply these steps in reverse order (see answer of trashgod).
For strings with the first translation I normally move the center of the bounding box to the origin and with the last translate move the string to the actual point on screen where the center should appear. Then I can simply draw the string at whatever position I like.
Rectangle2D r = g.getFontMetrics().getStringBounds(text, g);
g.translate(final_x, final_y);
g.rotate(-angle);
g.translate(-r.getCenterX(), -r.getCenterY());
g.drawString(text, 0, 0);
or alternatively
Rectangle2D r = g.getFontMetrics().getStringBounds(text, g);
AffineTransform trans = AffineTransform.getTranslateInstance(final_x, final_y);
trans.concatenate(AffineTransform.getRotateInstance(-angle));
trans.concatenate(AffineTransform.getTranslateInstance(-r.getCenterX(), -r.getCenterY()));
g.setTransform(trans);
g.drawString(text, 0, 0);

As a practical matter, I found two things helpful in understanding AffineTransform:
You can transform either a graphics context, Graphics2D, or any class that implements the Shape interface, as discussed here.
Concatenated transformations have an apparent last-specified-first-applied order, also mentioned here.

Here is purely mathematical video guide how to design a transformation matrix for your needs http://www.khanacademy.org/video/linear-transformation-examples--scaling-and-reflections?topic=linear-algebra
You will probably have to watch previous videos to understand how and why this matrices work though. Anyhow, it's a good resource to learn linear algebra if you have enough patience.