RegularKid, I asked this very question about two weeks ago. I have been scouring nVidia''s site for some time now, but have still been unable to find a good tutorial that teaches me how to use the register combiners to do bumpmapping. By good, I mean a tutorial which assumes that I know nothing about register combiners, which I don''t.

I found what I thought was a decent document by Mark Kilgard, but it contains so much calculus and advanced mathematics that I was told I could only understand it if I was a third year Maths Degree student (over here in the UK). And I''d need to understand it to understand the rest of his document. It doesn''t explain the principles behind bumpmapping nor the use of the register combiners very well. I was going to post a thread here on GameDev.net asking if anyone had a tutorial which could teach me how to use the nVidia register combiners. I mean, the guys who write nVidia''s demos must get their information from somewhere, as the majority of them don''t work for nVidia...

It seems that there are a lot of people out there besides me who are also looking for a good tutorial. Does anyone know of one me, RegularKid and everyone else could use?

Movie Quote of the Week:

"I''ve seen things you people wouldn''t believe. Attack ships
on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter
in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will
be lost in time, like...tears in rain. Time to die."

- Roy Batty, Blade Runner.
Try http://uk.geocities.com/mentalmantle - DarkVertex Coming Soon!

By the way, if you want to take a look at that document Mark Kilgard wrote, which I refer to above, it''s here:

http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=Practical_Bumpmapping_Tech

I challenge you to make any sense of it (Unless you''re a third year Maths Degree student)...

Movie Quote of the Week:

"I''ve seen things you people wouldn''t believe. Attack ships
on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter
in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will
be lost in time, like...tears in rain. Time to die."

- Roy Batty, Blade Runner.
Try http://uk.geocities.com/mentalmantle - DarkVertex Coming Soon!

I just read the pdf''s on the nVidia site. Theres a VERY good one which details the use of nvParse for register combiner setup.

As for doing some tutorials on it, Ive got a base up and running utilizing multitexturing and register combiners (via nvparse). Im undecided on how I should approach doing tutorials from it. Im thinking of totally ignoring the C side of things (loading the nvparse dll, function pointers, etc) and focusing on the actual nvParse pixel shader scripts themselves. Comments?

-----------------------
"When I have a problem on an Nvidia, I assume that it is my fault. With anyone else''s drivers, I assume it is their fault" - John Carmack

quote:Original post by RegularKid
That would be absolutely awsome if one of you guys could make a basic pixel shader tutorial for OpenGL. Yeah, I would be estatic if the tutorial showed how to just light a triangle realistically using pixel shaders. The main reason why I want to learn pixel shaders is because I am having lighting problems in my game engine. Basically, because OpenGL lights base the amount of light a vertex recieves by distance, I''m having problems with large polygons. When I put the light directly over any vertex on the polygon it works great, but as soon as I get in the middle of the polygon or between two vertices, the polygon gets no light because it''s too far away from any of the vertices. Thats where I beleive pixel shaders would come in to help me get perfect lighting no matter where the light source is. Am I correct in all this?

with a directional light distance is NOT taken into consideration only for positional lights, with gl lighting u need to tesselate the triangles finer.
if u dont wanna do that use a dot3 texture on the polygon (there r a lot of tutorials about bumpmapping on the net, in fact for 3d graphics it would be one of the top10 things covered so u should be able to find something)


http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/gotterdammerung.html