portal rendering

[almighty]

hi i'm new of irrlicht engine, i'm trying to write a little editor for this engine and i would like to know something about the portal rendering system used by irrlicht.

i know the "standard" method to implement a portal/sectors based rendering.....in the past with another little game engine i used this method:

1) import the scene file format, containing all sectors and the portals associated whit the sectors, the portal for me was an ordinary object, named for example "PORTAL_1" and so on, modelled in to modeler
2) build the bsp or occtree structure for each sector
4) place a start point indicating the first current sector
3) export the scene to the engine

........than the real time engine starts to draw the current sector and all the sectors visible true the portals visible an intersected by the main frustum, generating for each one a SUB FRUSTUM from the projection of the portal onto the front plane, with another draw list for each sector drawn........

Now i would like to know if the irrlicht engine uses the same method, and how could i pass the "OBJECT" portal, modeled in to the cad like 3DSMAX or similar, directly to the engine????

thaks a lot

[dhenton9000]

The octree produced by irrlicht is not portal based. You would have to implement your own portal system. I think its a straight octree partitioning.

[almighty]

The octree produced by irrlicht is not portal based. You would have to implement your own portal system. I think its a straight octree partitioning.

thaks a lot for your answer, i've really suspected about it........than the only solution is to implement my own portal/sector class.

you suggest me to use the camera class of the irrlicth or build another camera class to performe the controls on the frustum and sub frustum?

and should i start to implement from the tutorial "custom scene node"

P.S. the last question........"SCENE NODE" means "SECTOR"?

thanks a lot

[dhenton9000]

look at the custom scene node tutorial. niko specifically mentions using custom scene nodes for portals, yes, I think he's saying a portal sector would be created as an irrlicht scene node.

[irkab1rka]

If you mean a 3d view rendered into a 2d view in a 3d world on world 'portal' then please check http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=181
I think it will be a new shiny feature.

[irkab1rka]

I'm not sure if it is a good place to notify Niko, but anyway: I hope portals will have a reduced LOD because portals usually have wierd effects anyway so an absolutely accurately rendered portal view just waste of performance (until dual core GPUs in SLI of course )