How primitive are the primitive Scene nodes in Irrlicht?

[Paddon]

Hey all,

I was wondering, I want to take the irrlicht primatives (Sphere scene node and Cube scene node) and change their color and/or transparencies without using shaders or textures in an attempt to speed up my program and also because I do not know how to write shaders.

If this wasn't possible do you think I could find a free shader out there on the internet that will take care of this for me? Essentially I just want to be able to control the transparency of the cube and color with a simple function call as you can do in glut and openGL

[hybrid]

You have to use the setVertexColors method from MeshManipulator. Hmm, that won't work for them. I guess we need the MeshBufferManipulator sometimes...
You might be able to use the reference parameter in SMaterial to control the transparency degree with the proper Material. Don't know if this will be enough for your purpose.

[Paddon]

Yea it won't be. So I have decided to learn GLSL. Upon thinking about it some of the future plans for my VisApp will require some sort of computationally intensive graphics and knowing how to program my own shaders will prove useful.

I suppose looking for an easy way out is not always the answer haha.

Aside: Thanks for all your help Hybrid, you always seem to add something to all my posts and I appreciate it. Without this forum I would not be able to finish this program.

[hybrid]

I'll do my very best Maybe it's my interest in scientific projects
I think that these ad-hoc defined basic meshes will require some refactoring. We discussed a general primitive geometry factory some time ago, but did not go for it, yet. The manipulation facilities also require some refactoring IMHO, to wards a better integration of mesh buffers, SMesh, IMesh, etc. The latter might need some conceptual redesign of Irrlicht, though.