[JAVA3D] Object allocation within Java3D implementation

[Michael P. McCutcheon]

Platform: Windows 2000 SP2 CPU: 600 Mhz P3 Memory: 512 MB PC 133 Card: GeForce2 MX 400 32mb Drivers: NVidia 21.81 Java Version: 1.3.1 Java3D Version: 1.2.1_03 (OpenGL)   I've got a program that has a wakeuponelapsedframes running.  In this program, I have hundreds of Shape3D's that get moved and scaled, get their transparency set, and their emissive color set each frame.  The translating/scaling is FAST and does not seem to create any objects when transformGroup.setTransform(transform3D); is called.  However, whenever I perform changes to transparency attributes and or material on a Shape3D's Appearance, I get all kinds of garbage collecting going on (as evidenced with -verbosegc).  It seems that the two methods below create many objects in Sun's implementation.   transparencyAttributes.setTransparency(transpVal);   and   material.setEmissiveColor(redVal, 0.0f, 0.0f);   This makes using them for performance critical code a bad idea.  They do work ok, and there are no memory leaks, but the garbage collector is just getting hit pretty hard (it's running about once per half-second, for varying amount of times, depending on how many objects are updated), and it's taking CPU from the rest of my program.  When I comment out these 2 lines, the program only runs GC about once every 15 seconds.   My question is, is there any way around this?    Will the next version of Java3D (1.3) still create many objects when transparency/material are modified?  Can I rely on these methods to be efficient in the future, or should I not use them for mass updates every frame and find another way to do what I need to do?   Thanks for any insight...   Michael P. McCutcheon