Irrlicht Engine

I'm using Wings3D, and it looks nice and smooth in there:
http://big-brain.org/images/good_lighting.png

I found some posts on the forum saying that .3ds models have this problem with their normals not being interpolated for each poly they touch. I downloaded Deled and created a sphere, then ...

Okay, I've got a simple program that loads my model, and an FPS camera so I can inspect it. I put a light in, that orbits the model in a circle, so I can see some lighting effects. The problem is that everything looks faceted...like the lighting is done per-poly and not per-vertex, maybe? Here's a ...

I thought of something else this morning...haven't had a chance to try it yet. But the main thing (besides not being lit) that's ugly about the textured model is that geometry lines that should have a sharp difference in color (as between the cockpit glass and the frame) instead have a blotchy ...

Here's how my ship looks in Wings3d, with materials:
http://big-brain.org/images/in_wings.png

I'd like it to look that way in my game, but a search of the forum led me to the disappointing discovery that Irrlicht will not load colors from my .3ds model, and I have to use UV texturing instead. So ...

So, I got Rebirth, but I don't really know what I'm doing...I looked in vain for a tutorial on the internet. Is this an advanced tool that a newbie music maker has no hope with, or am I just looking in the wrong places?

Let's say I'm colliding a sphere against a terrain or level mesh. I'm interested in finding all triangles such that the distance to the closest point on the triangle from the sphere's center is less than the radius of the sphere.

The math is no problem, but I'm brand new to Irrlicht, and to 3D game ...

Pardon me if I'm just not getting it, but that still wouldn't get around the quantization of height to 256 levels, would it? What if I want a tall cliff in my terrain?

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I found this with a search, and it still seems to be an issue. I got around it by generating a 1024^2 heightmap, exporting it (as 256 colors), and upping the color depth to 16M, then resizing it down to 256^2 in Paint Shop Pro using Smart Size, which ...