Unfortunetely I can’t seem to get it working. I’ve tried beta3 and 4. In rendering setting I have Pixel shaders turned on. Yet no extra shininess and no realistic shadows gained. 🙁

I have Geforce 8800 GT 512 Mb (2.0 Nvidia-1.5.36) on MacPro 2.8GHz Quad-core, MacOSX 10.5.6. All Apple system updates are applied. Is my GF 8800 already obsolete or am I missing something here?

Any help is appreciated.

Cheers
Ari

I know you have mentioned on this blog before to maybe move to high dynamic range lighting system which would improve the tinted specular hugely. Have you ever tried to implement environment maps in X-Plane? I don’t mean a live lookup like the water, but just a static 360 image (i suppose it would have to change through a few different ones based on some presets of weather and time) along with a bit of fresnel effect it would really add more interesting shading, especially when the aircraft isn’t directly lit by sunlight

The mention in an earlier comment of normal maps i find an exciting prospect too, I can certainly imagine a plane with separate maps for spec and normals being quite amazing looking, add an environment map and we really could be seeing photorealistic aircraft. (assuming there are enough people making aircraft who have the skills to generate a good normal map)

I know all this is a massive job to implement and i expect its not a trivial impact on frame rate either.

In plane-maker it is a boolean setting (“plane is shiny”) – in an OBJ it is an ATTRibute, with a ratio from 0 (not shiny) to 1.0 (max shiny, matching plane-maker).

cheers
ben

KRZ – yes, specular maps are coming…I am not sure what the precise format will be — tinting the specular hilight arbitrarily may not be an option. (For example, consider a normal map where the RGB channel is used for normal deflection.) But…at this point this is more like a 940 feature.

Another map layer for OBJs gets us closer to a more formal “materials” model, which is pretty non-trivial.

AWC: I would say that both options are not quite equal. (Remember that I am thinking long term here, when we _do_ have per-pixel gloss control via a gloss map.)

– Separate specular is definitely useful!

– Non-separate specular I think is only useful for compatibility purposes.

So I would only want to provide the option _if_ we have a compatibility problem here.

If there isn’t a compatibility issue (e.g. in general most people can live with having their models be “relit” by the new separate lighting scheme) then avoiding the option and having only separate specular means one less combinatorial option in the material model in the long term.