Hi,
Does anyone know any good resources or descriptions of common ways of handling shading?
Like... multi pass rendering, post processing. But not just that. Good ways to organise materials and techniques and stuff too...
How it all might fit together in a "next-gen" (or more likely current-gen) engine.
?
(or recommend good books on it?)
organising a Shader pipeline? materials etc..
I don't know of any good books on it, but the concept isn't that hard. In fact you can basically tell the pipeline by looking at a Ogre .material file. And you can study the Ogre engine as well, just don't get caught by its evil ways. 
And also organize meshes/objects that uses textures in a way to reduce the number of material changes because these are the most expensive state changes.
By the way, post processing isn't that hard, and in fact there are numerous resources on these forums. Check XEffects, or search for post processing framework.
At any rate, once I finish implmenting occlusion culling, I was going to look into implementing multi-pass rendering in Irrlicht, but it's going to be big change for the material system from what I think.
And also organize meshes/objects that uses textures in a way to reduce the number of material changes because these are the most expensive state changes.
By the way, post processing isn't that hard, and in fact there are numerous resources on these forums. Check XEffects, or search for post processing framework.
At any rate, once I finish implmenting occlusion culling, I was going to look into implementing multi-pass rendering in Irrlicht, but it's going to be big change for the material system from what I think.
TheQuestion = 2B || !2B
But there's so many methods and stuff, it's mind boggling. I didn't check out the material files yet though. I'll go have a look.