Ardor3D is a free and open source, Java based 3D engine brought to you by Joshua "Renanse" Slack and Rikard "MrCoder" Herlitz (formerly developers of the jMonkeyEngine.)  Ardor3D began life as a fork of jME with the goal of making a more professionally oriented engine with a community based on accepted open source principles.

Requirements:

· Java

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

What's new:
· New CPU/GPU capable skeletal skinning framework.
· TextureClipMap (Megatexture) for use in Terrain or other geometry texturing.
· Ardor3D based UI System
· Completely rewritten Collada Importer - now much more functional and no longer requires JiBX.
· 3D Math functions (noise, fbm, etc.) and utilities for visualizing these as procedural textures or height-maps.
· BloomRenderPass, allowing simple addition of a "bloom" effect.
· Much improved, automatic resource cleanup - now handles detection of GPU referenced items being gc'd and automatically removes them from the card for you.
· Basic support for applets in place.


API Improvements / Changes:
· Terrain system now supports non-wrapping terrain, terrain transformations, improved fog, user definable height ranges and user initiated height-map updates.
· Water use "Oblique near frustum clipping" instead of OpenGL clip-planes to enable clipping on objects with shaders and has the ability to blur reflections.
· Terrain and Water now work a lot ...