Beginner Help! (Parallax, ShadowVolume, Shaders...)

[LINUZ]

Hi everybody! I've started using Irrlicht just a few weeks ago, so I have some questions to ask you...

1) When I use Parallax Mapping can I activate specular? I converted an .x mesh to Tangent and I put Parallax Mapping on it. All right, but Specular is not visible... Why?
2) Is it possible to apply different materials to an object (with different types, flags and settings)? Maybe making "upper" materials transparent using alpha maps...
3) I would apply ShadowVolume to the entire scene with

Code: Select all

driver->drawStencilShadowVolume();
driver->drawStencilShadow();

but I don't know how to create an array of all verticles in the scene to put into drawStencilShadowVolume()... Is there a better way to apply Shadow Volume to the whole scene?
4) Why when I apply AddShadowVolumeSceneNode to my .x mesh with Parallax activated shadows are invisible or wrong?
5) Which is the better open source (or just free) phisix engine for Irrlicht?
6) Which is the better way to integrate DirectX shaders in Irrlicht (for exemple created with NVidia FXComposer)?

Thanks a lot!
Sorry for bad english...Byez

[Praetor]

1) I don't think that the default irrlicht shader supports a specular component, if you know hlsl or glsl you could create one yourself...

2) You can make different parts of the same mesh have different materials by assigning the wanted materials in your 3D modeller and then accessing them with node->getMaterial() and setting them up as you want.

3) I'm not aware of any way of adding shadows to an entire scene (though there may be a function to do so that I have overlooked...

4) That I'm not sure about, stencil shadows in general can be rather glitchy and strange looking at times, but in combo with parallax mapping, I don't know...

5) I reccomend Newton Game Dynamics (not open source but free) which I've used for about a year now, that or Ageia PhysX which is free if you sign up for Ageia's Devsupport (also free), I've been working with PhysX for a few weeks and it works quite well (it was used in a number of commercial games).

6) I don't have much experience with shaders in irrlicht, perhaps you could look at some of the "shader packs" that have been released over the past while to see how others have done this?

Hope this helps...
Good luck!

[LINUZ]

Thanks for the help! Now I'm going to learn something more about hlsl and shaders in general, I think that will be really useful...
Bye!

[lester]

just some kind of lol:

it is really strange to hear about M$ hlsl from a guy with nick like 'LINUZ'