Hi Ulrich,
Maybe what Paul was asking about (and what I always like to learn from other people's setups) is: are the different textures (normals/specular maps) and shader assignments all set up when you get them from your modeller? Or do you have to do additional tweaking from within your program?
We currently don't use a 3D file format that allows for specifying normal maps and other types. Actually it does, but OSG doesn't read it so we'd need to do lots of work to extract the information anyways.
So no, we have our artists make models with diffuse textures, and make normal and specular maps and whatever else we want to make separately. We have config files that make the link between the nodes in the graph of the loaded 3D model, additional textures to load (the diffuse texture is already loaded as part of the original model) and shaders to apply. Most of the time a normal map / specular map is linked to a diffuse map (you'll have a diffuse map called "stone_wall.jpg" and a normal map called "stone_wall_normal.jpg" and both will use the same texture coordinates) so we also have a mode to do the association that way instead of explicitly by node name - we search through statesets to find the diffuse texture and do the association then.
This is very flexible, but unfortunately not artist-friendly, which I'll be working on improving soon. Our pipeline currently involves both artists and programmers to get those nice "advanced" effects (only ten years old or so in real time use ;-) ).
Given that shader effects are not standardized in OSG I think it would be hard to have it another way for now. OSG would really need to have its own shaders for all these effects, as well as an official tool or plugin to save the data in the right format out of the 3D content creation tool. Or specify that if you want these effects you need to use formats that support them, which I think for now is Collada and FBX only? Valve mdl too? They're not many anyways.
So essentially, if that were the case, OSG would be dictating how you use shaders in your app, and what your content creation pipeline is. I don't think that's OSG's place - at least not currently. An OSG-based engine can do that (which is basically what we're making for our simulators), but not OSG itself.
It's good that we get to do these demos as they give us ideas on what to improve in our process instead of just doing the same old thing over and over...
J-S -- ______________________________________________________ Jean-Sebastien Guay [email protected] http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.dyndns-web.com/ _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
