this is easy to verify, simply save a sphere in ms3d and 3ds formats and then load them into a scene with a dynamic light.
i believe the reason for this is that 3ds files do not store normals like most other formats, but instead use smoothing groups and assume that the loader/viewer will use those groups to reconstruct the normals. i guess irrlicht just ignores the normals. has anyone made a loader for 3ds that fixes this? or can we expect to see it in the future?
*.3DS files are not smoothed...
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thesmileman
- Posts: 360
- Joined: Tue Feb 10, 2004 2:20 am
- Location: Lubbock, TX
Are you using 3DS Max? in Max there is a smoothing option, used on sphere and other objects, that is the default that gives the illusion of smoothness(And it works quite well). The model when exported, if this option is on, would look far worse than it does in Max. I would assume other program has this feature. Try upping the number of sides and see if the file is still not smooth
Neither MAX, nor Irrlicht ignores normals. Normals control which way the poly's are shown. If you reversed the normals you would not see the front poly's of a model but the back polys. You can use this to create a black line around your model ( psudo cell shading ).
Don't believe everything you see in MAX is going to look the same in Irrlicht, MAX costs well over a grand and the renderer is very advanced ( and slow ). Irrlicht is much faster and the quality suffers, fact of life. I recon that Irrlicht probably does have smoothing but it is nowhere near as efficient as MAX so you probably will need more poly's at less accute angles to make it look good.
Don't believe everything you see in MAX is going to look the same in Irrlicht, MAX costs well over a grand and the renderer is very advanced ( and slow ). Irrlicht is much faster and the quality suffers, fact of life. I recon that Irrlicht probably does have smoothing but it is nowhere near as efficient as MAX so you probably will need more poly's at less accute angles to make it look good.