I wasnt going to go with full blown deferred rendering, so only my lighting pass will be defferred. That is, the first pass (ambient light, sun light / shadow and light / shadow from one or more lightening flashes) will be rendered the old fashioned way; but at the same time as doing this pass, I will generate g-buffers for the second pass to make use of. Here is a screen shot of what I have:

The top left image is the first pass; no shadows as yet, only a directional light. You will notice that I have rendered translucent geometry on this pass. In this pass, different materials have a different shader attached, and geometry is sorted in order of shader to avoid too frequent binding of new shaders and uniforms, which can be a bottleneck.




The second image is my albedo map; this is only the textures and material properties. You will notice that the translucent geometry doesnt write to this buffer, this allows me to use various tricks to get the translucent geometry into some g-buffers but not others. For example, I write to a specular buffer if need be, but miss out the albedo. I may need to seperate material properties and texture at some point but for now they are together.

The bottom two are world space normals, and world space position; by doing things in world space i've been able to simplify the way lights are gathered, I simply need to render all lights which intersect the view frustum.

Hopefully by the end of today I'll be able to render many lights using only the g-buffers, and use additive blending to apply them over the first pass.