Here is what I thought I would be able to easily do:
Download free models and use them from within a program that uses Irrlicht, using Irrlicht to bring my gaming ideas to life graphically (walking around on a terrain that I could generate and then "import" to Irrlicht).
Now, I have many questions!
It seems like what I download from sites is really just the triangle information. Perhaps this is painfully obvious, but this is quite annoying for me. The texture information is stored separately, and, even though it looks like I download a fully textured model from a site, it never really is that.The only luck I've really had is from an Irrlicht-associated site, where I was able to play with and display the Pond information perfectly - apparantly because the texture files are located in the same directory. Am I crazy? It sure seems like I download .3ds files and they are just blank untextured forms (usually pointing to textures that aren't available for download). What's worse, in the rare case that I have a texture file too, it is often in an unsupported format (.gif or .tif). While the file conversion is easily done, I have no way to edit the .3ds file change the name of the texture.
I understand that an alternate way of doing this is the way that the quake 2 models are done like in the example program. That actually makes sense to me, but I haven't found anything that would be useful to me in that format (like, say, trees, or a cathedral). If I had a blank model, how in the world could I tell Irrlicht to texture it in the appropriate places? It seems like this information must be done within the .3ds (or whatever) format itself.
I'm sorry for my ignorance, but I got pretty excited about Irrlicht, and now I'm a bit disappointed - but it isn't Irrlicht's fault at all! Is there any place with lots of free models to download in a format that is compatible with Irrlicht for both the "mesh" (triangle data?) and the textures? I guess I assumed there would be.
It looks like most people are interested in making their own characters and using Irrlicht to make a game or something else with them. That's great, but I'd think there are a lot of people like me who could use Irrlicht to do truly innovative things without artistic ability - if only we had access to models that we could just drop into Irrlicht! Do I just have to wait a few more years? I'd appreciate any insights people have for me!