(1) can you use more than 1 shader at a time in 3DGS?
(2) can you use more than 1 shader to different parts of level geometry st the same time in 3DGS?
(3) anyone have any screenshots of any of the above?


THANKS

--Mike

1) you can use as many shaders as you want.
2) you can use one shader per texture on world geometry. therefore if a block has 4 different textures applied to it's faces it can have 4 different shaders.

Thanks for the helpful info Matt...

looks like i'll be upgrading the license to 6.2,.3,etc...

one more thing... do you notice a significant performance hit as the number of shaders being used increases...

THANKS again

--Mike

Depends on the shaders used (and video card...). Some like the fur shader will hammer the frame rate, others are not so bad. Newer video cards handle the shaders a lot better than older video cards as well (making the hit on the older cards twice as bad when using shaders...once for being slow and again for being slow processing shaders).

Thanks Myrlyn...

for right now i really plan to use a bumpmap shader with different textures for a weathered metallic look...

... and maybe a shiny metallic one also.

do you think that those would be hard on say a radeon 9200 or a basic geforce ps 1.4 limited card?


--Mike

Hrmmm...

I could make it hard...then again you can also make it easy.

Take a good hard look at how shaders work and spend some time learning how to optimize them. Clean code runs much better than sloppy code...even when it is going through the GPU.

Other than that - bumpmapping can be very taxing when you have a lot of lights in the scene and a lot of texture space to be transformed. There are a lot of tricks invloved in the performance tweaking aspects (enough to fill an entire shelf of my library and then some). Read up and try it out - getting the desired shader working is easy - getting it to work efficiently is the tricky part.

Also - combine shaders where you can...you can get away with using a bump shader than following with others - it will run faster when it is a single process.

Here is my question: How do I "turn off" a shader as "my.material=null;" will crash the engine as I have read in a different thread.

just use my.material=mat_model;

That is freakin great

Thanks!