Do you use Irrlicht or IrrlichtNX

[Peter Müller]

Everyone seems to be very modest about his/her skills.
Concerning programming I consider me beeing an intermediate because I can do almost every thing I want with irrlicht and c++ at the moment.

This is, why i'm calling me an intermediate, too

[afecelis]

whoa! then I'm back to ultra mega supernoob!

[Electron]

Concerning programming I consider me beeing an intermediate because I can do almost every thing I want with irrlicht and c++ at the moment.

Woa. Either your very skilled or easily satisfied. If I could do everything I wanted to with Irrlicht and C++ I'd put in bumpmapping, portal rendering, and IK

[Peter Müller]

I don't want bumpmapping, and i don't know what ik is
But portalrendering could be done easy, i just need a method to change the render target, and that shouldn't be too difficult (under dx).

[erSitzt]

Bumpmapping is used to enhance the detail of a model without increasing the polycount ( my own understanding ...).

More information here :

http://developer.nvidia.com/attach/6426

[Peter Müller]

I know what bumpmapping is, but what is ik?

[afecelis]

Inverse kinematics.

It's an animation method used for bones or structures that got joints. It links each piece to the next one so if you move the first piece or bone it affects the other ones in a correct physical way.

3dsmax has got IK for its bones.

it's pretty kewl for industrial machines animations as well.

don't know much of the technical lingo but that's the idea

[Electron]

Of course for irrlicht to have IK it'd need a way to manipulate .X or .ms3d joints in real time. That shouldn't actually be toohard to put in though. One could create a function to return an SXAnimationSet. Then you could fill in the transformations in each SXAnimationTrack however you liked and feed it back to the engine. Of course still need some more math for doing IK. I can derive an FK equation for n joints in a 2D plane, but I can't figure out 3D and I can't figure out how to rearrange the FK equation to solve for the angles.

Bumpmapping I have no clue how to go about implementing it, except that it involves perturbing the normals.

In my opinion, the easiest way to get the culling benefits of portal rendering, or any other culling system one migth like to implement, would be to create a scenemanager function that accepted a linked list of scene nodes and would render all those nodes and only those nodes. Then you could implement any object culling structure you like. I'd probably make portals as a custom scene node and give them a render function which tested all nodes in the appropriate sector against a new set of clipping planes constructed with the camera position and the portal edges. I don't actually think it wouldbe too dreadfully hard, I just haven't gotten around to trying it yet. Of course, I'm talking about portal rendering simply to reduce overdraw. I don't believe that the system I just described would allow you to create views into non-adjacent sectors (without transforming the whole sector).

But I got really off the purpose of this thread, I apologize.