RE: [Algorithms] Character Animation/Storage ...

[Jon W. <hp...@mi...>]

I realize that there are many approaches, which all have pros and 
cons. For example, software vertex shaders (or rolling your own for 
the critical parts) is tractable on many CPUs, but it starts eating 
into your CPU budget real quick. If you're counting on GPU/CPU 
parallelism to let you do heavy compute lifting for things like 
physics, that's not so attractive.

If your object doesn't articulate, then it's trivial to just rotate 
the light into object space and use a static dot3 bump, but this 
doesn't work for objects that articulate.

I think the future belongs to putting all this on the chip, and I 
hope the consumer end of the spectrum will catch up soon enough. 
It's too bad that the current nForce (and, even worse, Intel chip 
sets) aren't yet GF3 class, but I'm sure that'll change in the 
coming year. And if you're on a console, well, you know what to do 
:-)

Cheers,

			/ h+

> You don't need to write a vertex shader to do such lighting. If you 
> are doing the lighting in tangent space, just transform the light 
> vector into tangent space and do per-vertex lighting using LdotH' So 
> you only need a buffer where you store the L vector in tanget space 
> and then use the hardware to do the dot product between L and H' (H'