Slightly off topic, but during my experimentation I discovered that, (at least it seems as so), models with multiple skins, do not cast stencil shadows??!??

I have a model comprised of 3 parts, the body, a bottle and a small note. In this state, the stencil shadow would not cast on my levels floor, also made with models.

As the model appeared to self cast, I put it down as 'stencil shadows' dont cast 'on to' multi-skin models.... However, it appears I am in error, indeed, shadows cast 'on to' multi-skin models, but are not cast by them...

anyone able to shed any light on this... or shadow

Meanwhile, on a shader related note, I have managed to complete my basic level and object modeling and have begun the process of applying shaders. So far I have only applied a simple Bump shader, straight out of the manual, which works nicely. However I would like to apply a normal, shader and diffuse map to level objects and similiar to the walls and floor of my level model.

I have read the links above and found a great deal of help, although I am unclear as to what Ventilators Mesh library, or indeed why I need this, so I would appreciate anyone giving a few pointers. I also have Sphere2, although we are not using this as a template, would be cool to hook up a couple of Matt's shaders...

I will share a couple of screenies of my work in progress, maybe this will help... (upload some later tonight)


Thanks in advance, and arrears, to all those offering help, you are the heart and soul of GS

First a couple of screens:



Here is a shot of the small level with a couple of objects added. The Cooler has a simple bump map shader applied.


Thanks to this thread:23 Post Processing Shaders for A6 Com/Pro, I have been able to add some nice basic shaders to the view.

They look very cool, even in this early stage and I will be including more effects like these: Nightvision, FlashBang, Dizzy, DOF, etc.

However what I am really interested in is, how do I apply different shaders to the level model, to include bump mapping, specular mapping etc.



I am still unclear as to what the mesh.dll is that is mentioned in Fogman's thread 'Lightmap+Normalmap for Subsets' as provided above, so in the meantime I am looking into how materials are applied and trying to get my head around it.

I am also going to investigate 'Soft Shadows' as I want to create a realistic environment where light and shadow is used to capture the right ambience/feeling.

Any pointers, always appreciated

TIA

indiGLOW,
I am not sure what version of game studio you are running, But with A7 you can now directly assign materials to level blocks inside WED. It is also rendered differently so you do not get the slow downs that made level shaders impossible on A6.

Thanks RAFU, I have been taking a look at a couple of A7 demos, the Venice one and Warehouse (Although this wont run for me for some reason).

I've been tring to work out if I should upgrade to A7 Pro from A6 Pro, but I am worried about lack of backwards compatability, and that I would need to learn a load more again.

Thanks RAFU, I will give it much thought

Sorry for not coming back to this thread sooner, especially since I had some questions that I hoped I could come back to you guys with.

We've donated a couple of models this week, one of which helps to highlight, what we are hoping to achieve, and why I am interested in assigning different shaders to different materials of a .MDL.



In the above model, the main torso has both a diffuse and mormal map created for it, in this case we've included the textures within the file. However we would like to work entirely with external textures and this in itself creates a few minor hurdles.

However the real meat of the issue is how do we write shaders that can be applied to different materials of a model, that also uses different textures dependant on each model. Most importantly we want to do this entirely on-the-fly; using both logical extrapulation, in the case of _NRML.tga or _SPEC.tga and direct designer settings for unique edge cases.

In other words writing a 'Shader Manager'.

We are already developing our own inhouse set of comprehensive tools, that make managing the data relativly simple to implement, however writing the actual shader manager is a task that I have not really kicked off yet.

Metaphorically, its hanging around on yellow post-it notes in my head, but we are now ready to begin to tackle this issue.

Really would appreciate some veteran help here, and please forgive my ignorance when it comes to coding a shader, but I have a very firm grip on the subject as a whole.

Cheers for any help you can offer, thoughts, suggestions and pointers for obvious pitfalls and good shader strategy would be much appreciated.

TIA

No Takers?

Ok well I will be taking a full stab at this over the weekend, I am hoping to have entity dependancies nailed some time tonight, tomorrow. So all being well I will be taking the first steps towards building the shader manager.

Some early thoughts.

- We would like to work exclusivly with external textures. (Certainly for the extra shader textures, but also diffuse maps.)
- To support within the manager different combinations of materials and shaders, possibly with some template/default settings for trees and such like.
- Other dependancies such as damage states for models and their associated skins will also be included here.
- Collision models should also be included in the dependancy structure.

The upshot is that the manager should allow both materials/shaders to be manipulated and set, but also to link together all models (components) for every level entity.

Obviously special cases such as game entities such as NPC / player models will not be handled here.

Not sure if anyone is interested in the above, I know there is a tendancy for some peeps here to talk about what they are 'going' to do, and often fail to deliver the product, but... all being well it may provide a historical account of how we managed to get from A - B.

C&C Welcome as always

After a recent painful post regarding ent_mtlset and it's usage, I have managed to implement a simple multi-material, multi-shader function which I am now integrating with our toolsuite.

Thanks to everyone who helped out, and accept my apologies for the random postage, littering the threads.

Thanks again