I am currently trying to implement a deferred rendering system. I'm having a few problems. First, the vertex shader seems to silently fail when it tries to use the boneIndices, and it doesn't fail if i'm rendering normally( same exact vertex shader ). So what i'm left with is the model in his T-pose if I try to render with my deferred renderer. Second, I am currently creating, setting, and releasing the render targets every frame for the build pass of the deferred system because for some reason when I create the render targets once, and then just set and reset them every frame, I get a D3D warning starting on the second frame that tells me that it can't render to a texture that is already set. After I render to those targets, I set them as textures for the lighting pass. After I render, I reset the textures to NULL. Anyone have any insight?

Well here's what i'm doing in my render loop( in pseudocode, my project is on another computer at the moment )...

SetShaderTechnique( "buildpass" )
createRenderTarget( x4 )
clearRenderTarget( 0x00000000 ) ( x4 )
setRenderTarget( x4 )
renderModel
resetRenderTargets( first one I set to the backbuffer, the other three to NULL )
SetShaderTechniqe( "lightingpass" )
SetTexture( x4 )
RenderQuad()
ResetTexture( NULL )( x4 )
DeleteRenderTarget()( x4 )

The creation and deletion of render targets was just to get around that problem temporarily. If I remove the creation and deletion of the render targets, the problem comes up( can't render to a texture being used as a texture blah blah blah ). This code executes just fine on the first frame, and then on the second frame renderModel fails because of that render target problem. I'm sorry I can't actually provide code right now, but does anything about this look wrong?

I haven't tried PIX, but it boggles my mind that if i'm using one effect/technique the animation works, and if I switch to my deferred effect/technique it stops working even though the vertex shader is identical( pixel shaders are different, but it fails before it gets to them, so it shouldn't matter ) .

A little back story....I was using software vertex processing, and when I switched over to hardware vertex processing, the indices( which were being passed as floats in texcood5 at the time ) stopped working, and the vertex shader failed. I switched to blendWeight and blendIndices( on the "forward" rendering shader ) and things started working. So I switched shaders to the deferred one, and poof, no go( but like I said same vs ). I'll have to give PIX a go, but i'm 99% sure that the data is correct.

sorry for the rambling...if this info is helpful, let me know if you can help. Otherwise I'll post some code once i'm on my other computer.