Omitting Normals -- Advice

Started by Vincent_M, Jan 10 2013 04:26 PM

Old topic!
Guest, the last post of this topic is over 60 days old and at this point you may not reply in this topic. If you wish to continue this conversation start a new topic.

You cannot reply to this topic

1 reply to this topic

#1 Vincent_M Members - Reputation: 310

0Likes

Posted 10 January 2013 - 04:26 PM

I'm rewriting my model loader to support COLLADA, and I'm not sure how to handle vertex normals for lighting. I have all the shades and calculations working, but if I wanted to turn lighting off, I feel that it's wasting memory if I allocate and setup normals regardless. Especially if I'm updating my normals when lighting is OFF.

What are your opinions?

Edited by Vincent_M, 10 January 2013 - 04:33 PM.

Sponsor:

#2 Nyssa Members - Reputation: 380

0Likes

Posted 13 January 2013 - 03:25 AM

So will lighting be off for the duration of an application or does a player enable/disable it at runtime via a light switch or something? If lighting will be off for the duration of an application then you'd just be wasting memory and time in sending that data to the GPU if you were to include them. So in that case I wouldn't include them. If it's a runtime thing (like a light swtich) then in my opinion it would be better to keep the normals around. That way you can take advantage of static buffers that perform better than dynamic buffers.

Check out Nyssa 3D

Back to OpenGL

Old topic!
Guest, the last post of this topic is over 60 days old and at this point you may not reply in this topic. If you wish to continue this conversation start a new topic.