Panda3d:

Can anyone point me to a beginners level normal mapping and shadows tutorial or code? I have done these both individually in panda3d but cant get them to work together? Please can anyone help as this is for a finalmasters project thats due in september!!

Thanks in advance.

Why on earth are you asking for help for Panda3D on this forum when they have a perfectly good forum?

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Simply because I have exhausted the people at the panda3d forum on this matter. Thought maybe somebody had had luck here? i type in panda3d in a google search and this forum came up, so I presumed that something or somebody here had experience with it.

ah, fair enough. Sorry, I probably could have worded my last post a bit more nicely

I don't know much about Panda3D, but for most graphics engines you end up writing shaders for these things. If this is the case, what your asking is actually graphics-engine independent, which is good news because that means there's going to be a lot more material on it

Do you have any experience with shaders?

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Worlds at War (Current Project) - http://www.awkward-games.com
Ganadu'r, The Eternal Sage (Other Current Project) - http://rpg.naget.com
Programming tutorials and web-design services: http://www.wyrmmage.com

Unfortunately I don't but I do know that the panda3d engine uses cg shader language. I'm a little vague on this but, does that mean that the language itself is completely independent of the engine, meaning could I write a cg shader for panda that would work without modification on another engine that uses cg? If so, surely somebody out there has written an all-in-one, or something like it?

Cg, eh?

Well, first off, I'd recommend reading up on shaders....there's a lot of power in them. I generally don't recommend copying and pasting code (at least until you understand it), but yes, there are tons of pre-made shaders out there, in a variety of different languages (like cg). Shaders aren't exactly drag-and-drop (you'll still have to figure out how to wire it up with your engine), but a quick google shows that there's tons of tutorials out there.

Good luck
-wyrmmage

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Worlds at War (Current Project) - http://www.awkward-games.com
Ganadu'r, The Eternal Sage (Other Current Project) - http://rpg.naget.com
Programming tutorials and web-design services: http://www.wyrmmage.com

Cheers man. Its for a masters final project that is due at the end of september, so I'm getting a little desperate. I f I can't get a solution I'm gonna have to rewite everything in a new engine. Any suggestions on another open source project?

P.s.Bearing in mind, I need: Skeletal animation,normal,specular and diffuse mapping. Some form of shadow casting.Andmaybe some kind of bsp/csg as a bonus?

I'd go for Ogre. It can do all of the stuff you asked for and the community is very active (although some of the features you talk about look only doable in shaders, which are independent from OGRE).

Watch out with the shader stuff, it can get quite hellish. Read a lot on these and take out those linear algebra books. Take any time estimate you might have and multiply it by two. Good luck

Why do you want to switch to another engine when shaders are pretty much engine-independent?

_________________
Worlds at War (Current Project) - http://www.awkward-games.com
Ganadu'r, The Eternal Sage (Other Current Project) - http://rpg.naget.com
Programming tutorials and web-design services: http://www.wyrmmage.com