i voted for soft shadow editor, because i believe shadows should be customizable by default, and to me it seemed the best choice

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I would like to see gamestudio integrate into blender and MED get disposed of.

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I would not want GS integrated into blender, just to add FBX file import/export to WEB/MED which is in development.

I'd *love* to see an import from Blender that would retain materials, not just textures (there's an exporter plug-in now for Blender to MDL7, which just retains textures). Sure, Blender has a bit of a learning curve...at first, but once you get the hang of it it's actually pretty fun to use. I won't lie and say that I'm an ace who knows everything about Blender, but what I've used so far--namely the modeling and texture applications, is fairly easy. If 3DGS could import with materials too, then I'd take the time to use them in Blender, instead of and/or in addition to textures.

My 2 cents.

I don't mean get rid of WED, just enable lite-c/c-script(there is a text editor in blender) and a call to the Achnex engine frome within blender, besides I only use MED(I'm not the only one)to manage skins and frames..everything else is done in either max,lightwave,trueSpace, and since the mdl exporter...blender. blender also has great uv mapping and texture painting. though ditching med altogether could handicap/alienate some users.

once 3dgs flawlessly supports arbitrary level geometry i will do a blender (and probably also modo) scene exporter (with support for setting skills, scripts, lights, automatic recognition of instanced models, directly calling the map compiler and the engine,...).

i also will work on material support once i have more time again. i don't know yet how it will work. maybe there just will be some default shaders which will use the available maps and settings of blender's materials. or a shader network to hlsl translator but i guess this would be quite tricky.

Sounds very interesting ventilator. I really support this ideas and if I can help you with models and textures then just contact me.

Material support is interesting but currently not needed. Maybe it makes sense in the future with new procedural shaders. But even in a rendering application a procedural shader is much slower than a texture with uv-map.

So my advice to all gamestudio users is to use textures with uv-maps instead. It looks better is more flexible and will be the standard for a long time.

Materials are an easy way in an application but look not very realistic in a game.

i don't mean procedural textures (though probably they will become more and more useful for realtime too).

currently my exporter only cares for color maps which got assigned in blender's uv-editor. it would be nice if it could also recognize bump maps, specular maps,... and other settings in blender's materials and then automatically choose and set up the right shader template for exporting.

ok, in case i need some test models i will contact you.

Wow. That sounds great. A more clean pipeline for normal or parallax mapping could make much fun.

Your welcome. Just pick a few textures up from our sci-fi pack. I can even wrap them around a few models but I am sure you can do it yourself in Modo or Blender. They already have normal, specular and height maps.

Frank

Hi JCL and ventilator

web page

This looks good...


Abstract
We present a new method for real-time rendering of shadows in dynamic scenes. Our approach builds on the shadow map algorithm by attaching geometric primitives that we call "smoothies" to the objects' silhouettes. The smoothies give rise to fake shadows that appear qualitatively like soft shadows, without the cost of densely sampling an area light source. The soft shadow edges hide objectionable aliasing artifacts that are noticeable with ordinary shadow maps. Our algorithm computes shadows efficiently in image space and maps well to programmable graphics hardware. We present results from several example scenes rendered in real-time.

and check this out

web page