jMonkeyEngine 3.0 Beginner's Guide

Chapter 4. Adding Character to Your Game

There comes a time when you leave the basic shapes behind and make something fancier. Whether the 3D game of your dreams is set on a terrain, in a city, or in a space station; whether the characters roaming your maps are unicorns, warriors, or race cars: unless you generate procedural graphics on the fly, you need 3D models to populate your world.

In the previous chapters, you acquired the two essential skills that a 3D game developer needs: you can initialize a scene, and you can make it interactive using the update loop and input listeners. With what you know, you could already write your own Blockout! Granted, falling cubes are not very exciting. Where are the ninjas, space ships, and cities?

In this ...