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