If I use color materials, my models have a plasticky look. While that is my problem, my questions are 2-fold: 1. I know there is a GL_SHININESS parameter if I use glMaterialf, but that doesn't work for color material, does it? What options do I have with color material to change the appearance of a model? (I would be grateful if you gave me ALL parameters - transparency, shininess, et al) 2. I am using a basic Gouraud shading algorithm. I suspect that Phong shading would help with the specular highlights. I know it uses surface normals as well as vertex normals, but I have no idea how to implement it. Thanks for any suggestions and / or help!

Check out this page:
http://sjbaker.org/steve/omniv/opengl_lighting.html

Before drawing an object, I do something like this:


Those values were taken from:
http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~lscarlat/graphics/SurfMats.html

This should take away ur plasticy look. Enjoy!

Thanks ignisdeus, thos links were VERY helpful! I did as you suggested, but - it sometimes looks like the object's appearance is changing suddenly (not a smooth transition) as the orientaion to light changes. Is maybe glMaterial slow or something? As the page in the first link said? There doesn't happen to be a cure to that, does there?

Also, do you have any tips on how to model glass with material settings? You can imagine what I want - transparent but reflections to light (like real glass).

And, about the Phong shading thing - does anyone have a clue?

Hello,
It's hard to say why your object looks strange without seeing the source, but I know when I started, 99% of the time the lighting looked weird it was because I forgot to use normalized normals ;). Anyhoo, great info on lighting and what seems like a very good GLSL tutorial can be found on http://www.lighthouse3d.com/opengl/glsl/. Be prepared to spend some time if you really want to understand this stuff though.

Hmmm, I can't enter the lighthouse3d website ... maybe down or something? And I am using unit normals - I do that in the model loading routine so that there are no mistakes. [smile]

... And still no one wants to tell me about Phong shading. Well, I decided to force it in: firstly I know zip about GLSL or any other shading languages. And as it looks like in ANY articles on Phong shading I can get my hands on, it seems like I will have to write my own shaders. Someone please correct me if I am wrong.

And I would be grateful for any help with the "making stuff look like glass" thing ...

As far as glass goes, from:
http://www.opengl.org/resources/faq/technical/transparency.htm

Quote:
How can I render glass with OpenGL?

This question is difficult to answer, because what looks like glass to one person might not to another. What follows is a general algorithm to get you started.

First render all opaque objects in your scene. Disable lighting, enable blending, and render your glass geometry with a small alpha value. This should result in a faint rendering of your object in the framebuffer. (Note: You may need to sort your glass geometry, so it's rendered in back to front Z order.)

Now, you need to add the specular highlight. Set your ambient and diffuse material colors to black, and your specular material and light colors to white. Enable lighting. Set glDepthFunc(GL_EQUAL), then render your glass object a second time.

No clue on the phong shader, sorry I can't help you there. If it still looks plastic like, I'd either say your normals aren't being scaled OR your program is using the vertices as the normals.
This is what my model looked like when using the vertices as normals:
http://www.angelfire.com/space2/artib/Guy.jpg

Glad I could help btw :).

Well I AM using vertex normals for the smooth shading. It must still be possible to have a specular hilight, right? Anyway, your earlier post helped with that, ignisdeus. And that was a great link on transparency ... you have a great googling talent, I must say!

EDIT: fixed typo [wink]

Quote:Original post by deavik
Well I AM using vertex normals for the smooth shading. It must still be possible to have a specular hilight, right? Anyway, your earlier post helped with that, ignisdeus. And that was a great link on transparency ... you have a great googling talent, I must say!

EDIT: fixed typo [wink]

Vertex normals? Meaning you're using the vertices, as the normals? If you are, this could be the problem. If not, ignore this.

Anyways, I'm sorry I claimed I know nothing about phong shaders. I was thinking of anisoptric, which is the kind of shading a CD has, the one that bends and looks like an "S". If I think of phong the same way you do, maybe these picture will show you something you like. I made this random revolved shape in maya, and then this is what it looks like in OpenGL (keep in mind it has 70k triangles, thats why it looks so nice):




If the images aren't showing up (lame angelfire) here are the links:
http://www.angelfire.com/space2/artib/RandomShape1.jpg
http://www.angelfire.com/space2/artib/RS2.jpg
http://www.angelfire.com/space2/artib/R3.jpg

I use the following code before I render the object (the code for when the F3 key is pressed is suppose to be 'plus'=0.1f, but this board doesn't do plus signs):


The ambient, diffuse and shiny values are the one from the page above for silver. I simply changed the specular values, using custom values. Throw this into a program, and hit F3 to increase the specularity. If you go into negatives, the surface will actually absorb light and turn black. I hope this is what you meant by phong shader. Ooo, and this is the light I was using at the time too:

GLfloat diffuse_light0[] = { 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f };glLightfv( GL_LIGHT0, GL_DIFFUSE, diffuse_light0 );

I hope this helps! Glad my googling skills are helping you, they never work for me! lol.

Ignisdeus, I still couldn't see your images - just the angelfire logo. They must not allow direct external links, like, you must visit the page or something. I wonder how they do that?

Anyway, I tried out what you said, and a strange thing is happenning to me. Negative values for specularity make the object brighter, values nearer 1.0f just make the object almost black. I wonder if you have a clue about this, cause I don't ...