Thanks for the demo! I have never understood how spherical and cube environment mapping could be used in anything other than the very smallest demo since it requires multiple offscreen rendering to get the surrounding textures. Your demo just creates the surrounding textures and fills them with colors, which is good as an example. But for for this type of mapping to have value you would need to render the scene from the vantage point of the mapped object 6 times into an offscreen buffer and then turn them into textures for the env-map. I don't understand how this can be done with any kind of speed. For example, if an application runs at 100 frames a second normally and you wanted to create a cube map for a shiny box that drifting through your scene, then you would need to render the scene 7 times, 6 to build the env map, and then 1 to draw the whole scene. Not counting the time to move those textures back and forth your fps would run something like 18 fps. That seems like extremely high pice to pay for a relatively unimportant visual improvement.
I have seen examples where people use environment maps to show the reflection of the sky and terrain in the water.. but if that is spherical mapping then you would need to recompute it every frame. Cube mapping would only have to be computed if the scene changes, but at least it does not have to be recomputed if the orientation of the camera changes. Another trick is not to sue environment mapping at all, but render the scene without the water, and then texture map that back into the water, which requires complete scene redraws. Seems like all these techniques are horridly impractical unless you have an extremely simple scene. Would people really put up with (at the very least) cutting their framerates in half so they can see a reflecton? =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
