new to shaders

Im also running into some problems with shaders, been a while since I was here and it seems I have forgotton most of what I knew, and that wasnt much I can tell you...

I have been through the tutorials on the wiki but I noticed this issue with Dx8 and Dx9 problems? More confusion for us simpletons...

Personally I need a normalmap shader that wil run on my Rad9800pro. I am working on the process for creating acurate tangent normal maps in 3D max and getting it into GS and I can tell you I am not having much luck... lots of black stuff....when it works.

While I appreciate the comments made by those who know here, tired of answering noob questions about how to use a shader.... There is clearly still grey areas and it's very hard to get up and running...

However in defence, I noticed that I was only displaying messages no older than a month and so was missing a lot of earlier tutorials and advice. I think a sticky post here with 'How to get up and running with shaders' would be a great idea, and maybe stop people like me asking stupid questions over and over again...

Edit:

This is the thread where I am looking at normal mapping techniques, Generating Normals with Max, just incase you feel like helping me out Steempipe

Sure... seems like a good way I can spend the long holiday weekend that's coming up. I'll PM you when I need some info after I digest your linked post.

BTW: To a few (you know who you are ) other members... I'll be looking into your requests, too.

My game plan is to merge both my recent texture baking experiments and biped animations to set up a fast way of generating new models for GS...

The plan being to bake both the diffuse and normal textures in max on the model, attach the model to the biped rig and pull in my premade animation files, then export and it should all be wonderful...lol

I will look out for your PM and finish the UV on this dude asap....




Please ignore the bad seam's on the highrez version I have'nt finished tying the vertex's together yet - I think I can bake most of the 14k poly model into the lowrez normal map so that shader would be mighty useful

Sorry for high-jacking your post zefor
I have now started a new more appropriate thread Here

Steempipe, in your tutorial it states:
It is assumed that you have a general knowledge of:
-Producing a Normalmap in exterior software

I do not. is there a tutorial for this somewhere? I have not found it. Tried "normalmap" in the search, but found nothing on how to make them with exterior software. Does anyone know where to point me to? Thanks.

NEVERMIND! found this webpage. http://www.snarkpit.net/editing.php?page=tutorials&game=HL2&id=186
it says something abouit compiling the two textures with vtex.exe. What is that? do i need it or do we do something different with the two textures in Gstudio?

Ignore the vtex stuff. That is not us.

Make your normalmap (Nvidia tools, ATI tools, Gimp plugin, whatever) and it will be the RGB components of the mtlskin1. No alpha work done in that particular shader tutorial.

I think I almost have it. Floor looks ok but wall is black (but I see bumpmapping, just no texture or color). They dont like static lights eigther. What could I be doing wrong with the wall?
Got it working! How can I use this technique on models?

This only reacts to sunlight. How can I get it to react with static or dynamic lights? If I have any other light source in my level the normal maps cannot be seen.

The tutorial in the Wiki was designed as a guide on getting material effect's working with level geometry. The shader itself is kinda lame, and was never really meant to be a complete answer for normalmapping. Therefore, I had left out many details with it.

You will not get the static light info into the shader through engine var's. You could program the dynamic lights to be passed, but you'll also need to caluclate attenuation, falloffs and such. Also, adding the sum of level lighting might help.

You should look at "The Ultimate Lighting Shader" work by Matt A., there you can see how to accomplish all this and more. You can always eliminate passes, move normalizations from the pixelshader to vertexshader and therefore acoomodate lower model hardware pixelshaders.

Eric